Glossary of terms

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 which indicate visual, auditory or kinesthetic thinking (processing).


Dissociation: The process of stepping outof a thought, representation, mental movie, or state to see and hear things from outside as a spectator. Association and dissociation are relative terms, whenever we step out of one state, we are always stepping into another state. Epistemology: The study of how we know what we know. NLP, as an epistemology, is based upon the cognitive distinction “the map is not the territory.”


Distortion: The modeling process of altering representation of something in neurology or linguistics to create limitations or resources.
First Position: Perceiving the world from your own point of view, associated, one of the perceptual positions.


Downtime: Moving from a state of sensory awareness, to going "down" inside to see, hear, and feel thoughts and memories. A light trance state with attention focused inward.


Dragon: A dragon state in the MetaStates model is an unresourceful state in which our energies are turned against ourselves. See Dragon Slaying (2000).
Frame: Context, environment, metalevel, 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.


Ecology: The dynamic balance of elements in a system that produce health and well-being in larger contexts and relationships. In asking “the ecology question” we ask about how a belief, state, decision, or Generalization: Process by which one specific experience comes to represent a whole class of experiences, one of the three modeling processes.


Genius: A highly focused state of engagement wherein the world goes away, time, self, and others go away, and one is completely present to some engagement, in “flow,” “in the zone,” and having full access to one’s resources. See Secrets of Personal Mastery (1999).


Gestalt: A German term for something that is “more than the sum of the parts.” A gestalt state arises when new emergent properties combine.
meta-level drives and modulates the levels or layers below it.


Loops: A circle, cycle, a 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, looping refers to going through a set of procedures that have no way out, no exit.


Incongruence: An inner state of conflict between beliefs, emotions, meanings, hopes, dreams, fears, etc., the lack of total commitment to an outcome expressed in incongruent messages, signals, lack of alignment or matching between word and behavior.


Installation: Incorporating a new mental strategy in our mind-body system so it operates automatically. Installation is often achieved through anchoring, reframing, control questions, etc. metaphors, parables,


future pacing, quality


Internal Representations: All of the sights, sounds, sensations, smells, and tastes that play out on the theater of our mind as our snapshots and movies.