John Grinder Quotes

“The ability of a religious or business leader to inspire, motivate, generate interest, capture attention, depends critically on metaphor. if you actually listen to what people say, there's almost no content substance to it.”

“The basic unit of analysis in face-to-face communication is the feedback loop.”

“The only justification for the application of NLP patterns is the creation of choice and precisely in the context in which choice presently does not exist.”

“Wisdom comes from experience, but experience is not enough. Experience anticipated and experience revisited is the true source of wisdom.”

“If I use any words that don't have direct sensory referents, the only way you can understand those — unless you have some program to demand more sensory-based descriptions — is for you to find the counterpart in your past experience.”

“In order for you to understand what I am saying to you, you have to take the words — which are nothing more than arbitrary labels for parts of your personal history — and access the meaning, namely, some set of images, some set of feelings, or some set of sounds, which are the meaning for you of the word 'comfortable'.

That's a simple notion of how language works, and we call this process transderivational search. Words are triggers that tend to bring into your consciousness certain parts of your experience and not other parts.”

“My understanding is that language is the accumulated wisdom of a group of people. Out of a potentially infinite amount of sensory experience, language picks out those things which are repetitive in the experience of the people developing the language and that they have found useful to attend to in consciousness.”

“There's an illusion that people understand each other when they can repeat the same words. But since those words internally access different experiences — which they must — then there's always going to be a difference in meaning.”

“When it comes to language, we're all wired the same. Humans have pretty much the same intuitions about the same kinds of phenomena in lots and lots of different languages.

If I say "You that look understand idea can," you have a very different intuition than if I say "Look, you can understand that idea," even though the words are the same.

There's a part of you at the unconscious level that tells you that one of those sentences is well-formed in a way that the other is not.”

“Creative geniuses are:

1. Comfortable with uncertainty
2. Able to hold seeming opposites or paradoxes
3. Persistent”

“One of the strategies that they taught us was how to generate an even greater amount of learning and choice from every experience or life situation. We were instructed to review the events of the day and identify the significant choice points. We were to reflect on the choices we had made at those points and whether they were successful or unsuccessful in reaching our desired outcome.

For each choice point, we were to imagine three alternative ways we could have responded, other than the way that we did (whether or not what we did was successful). In our imagination, we were to then project the results and consequences of each alternative and imagine what it would be like to have actually made this choice by stepping into the experience and fully living it somatically in imagination.”

“Remain, however, a firm believer in the value of the fundamentals. It is difficult to master the really slick stuff without core tools like the Meta Model, accessing cues, calibrations, anchoring, sub-modalities, and an understanding of how and why these are important.”

“Remember: the journey is the destination.”

“So, what every parent would want their college kids to know: Look for patterns, they are always there. Challenge all my assumptions.

Change, Jim, can be good. Use all my senses, even the ones I am not aware of. Understand the world from another’s perspective, not mine. Listen more, talk less; if I do talk, ask questions.

Everyone is doing the best job they can given the limitations of their beliefs. My job is to get people to use the best of themselves to get better, to improve. Everyone has a chance; if something didn’t work, it’s because of my limitations, not the other person’s. I am ultimately accountable for and own the outcomes of my choices. All of them.”

“The first application was named Mind Master, which was followed by the NeuroLink and a commercial computer game called MindDrive. Today, these applications are available through Somatic Vision.”

“The greeting of risk, the willingness to discover through (certain classes of non-lethal) trial and error, the subordination of success to exploration and discovery, and the insistence of finding the edge of patterns; where they fail, all of these seem to contain echoes of field work in Special Forces and related intelligence organizations, the passion for languages, the recognition that much of what passes for effective communication can be achieved with very little actual understanding, the primacy of non-verbal communication in influencing face-to-face communications, a tolerance for ambiguity and vagueness, and a fascination with the unknown.”