Yeah, that sounds really suspicious, actually. See, there’s this thing called the “placebo effect”. How do you know which of your willpower tricks work only because you expect them to work? Or should I not ask that?
Actually, it’s a trope of the Mind Hacker’s Guild that “if you’re not surprised, you probably didn’t change anything”. So expectation is not required, only sufficient suspension of disbelief to actually carry out a process. (As I said, I’ve tested techniques I thought were downright stupid, and found that as long as I actually did them, and emphasized unconscious non-verbal components over analytical/verbal ones, I was able to get results.)
Now, in order to get almost any technique to work, you have to assume that it’s possible for it to, at least in principle, in much the same way that you aren’t going to find a way to get FAI to work unless you assume that it’s possible, at least in principle. Otherwise, you’ll give up way too soon to get results.
Within all usable techniques, there are certain steps that might be called “entry criteria”. For example, in my thoughts-into-action video, I describe the “mmm test”, which is an entry criterion for engaging the particular kind of motivation demonstrated. You have to pass the test for the technique to work. If you don’t, then there’s no point bothering with the rest; it’s simply not going to work.
Similarly, for many NLP techniques, the entry criterion is being able to identify driver submodalities for some characteristic. If you don’t achieve that criterion, the rest of the technique is irrelevant. Meanwhile, your failure to achieve the entry criterion does not mean the technique is broken; it simply means you haven’t learned to achieve that criterion unassisted. (Some criteria are easier to achieve than others, especially unassisted.)
This might sound suspiciously like moving the blame from teacher to student. But to use a martial arts analogy, you can’t successfully perform a combination move, if you can’t yet perform the individual moves within the combination. This doesn’t mean the combo is useless, it means you haven’t learned the prerequisites.
Here’s what happens, though, when people try to learn techniques without feedback about the entry criteria: either they accidentally or inconsistently stumble through the criterion, or they mistakenly believe they’ve reached it, when they’ve actually misunderstood the criterion. The former people get results, the latter people don’t.
(i.e., if you already “get” punching and kicking, you’ll master combinations more quickly, but if you’re punching and kicking wrong, it doesn’t matter if you can do the combination of those wrong punches and kicks.)
You can test all this and see for yourself: watch my video and compare what happens when you do and don’t achieve criterion. You can also try teaching it to other people, with and without the criterion test, and see whether it works or not.
You could interpret entry criteria as meaning that “some things work for some people”, but I think this is an error. If you do that, you won’t try hard enough to find different ways to teach.
Hildegard’s hypnotizability research was off-base because it assumed that “hypnotism” was a fixed sequence of exactly-repeatable steps, i.e., that if you tape-record an induction and play it back to a bunch of people, it’s an acceptable test of “hypnotizability”.
In practice, just like everything else, hypnotism is an interactive process with entry criteria. A good hypnotist varies their behavior—timing, rhythm, tone, choice of words or images, etc. -- based on the subject’s real-time responses. They use externally-visible entry criteria to test the subject’s depth and responses, before engaging in suggestions, etc.
I’m not sure if I’m explaining this well. What I’m saying is, Things That Work have testable criteria and include parts that require looking for ways to achieve those criteria, where the ways of achieving the criteria vary from one person to another, but the net effect of getting to the criterion is that you can do something that’s universal or very nearly so.
Achieving those criteria is also an objective matter, even if the perception of those criteria is subjective. That is, you should be able to objectively determine whether something feels a certain way, even if nobody else can observe it on the outside.
(Part of formal NLP training for therapists, however, involves learning to observe the exterior signals of these feelings, so that you’re not dependent on a client’s skills in subjective introspection. I don’t use that in my work, though, because I work long distance without the aid of remote video.)
Anywho… what I’m trying to say is, you will be able to tell whether you’re experiencing a placebo effect or not, because to achieve entry criterion for a technique, you will have to try some things, and some of them will not work. Your own observation of what personally works or does not work, will provide you with adequate demonstration that it is not just a placebo effect, unless you just so happen to be (un)lucky enough to stumble on the right thing at the very first try. ;-)
Actually, it’s a trope of the Mind Hacker’s Guild that “if you’re not surprised, you probably didn’t change anything”. So expectation is not required, only sufficient suspension of disbelief to actually carry out a process. (As I said, I’ve tested techniques I thought were downright stupid, and found that as long as I actually did them, and emphasized unconscious non-verbal components over analytical/verbal ones, I was able to get results.)
Now, in order to get almost any technique to work, you have to assume that it’s possible for it to, at least in principle, in much the same way that you aren’t going to find a way to get FAI to work unless you assume that it’s possible, at least in principle. Otherwise, you’ll give up way too soon to get results.
Within all usable techniques, there are certain steps that might be called “entry criteria”. For example, in my thoughts-into-action video, I describe the “mmm test”, which is an entry criterion for engaging the particular kind of motivation demonstrated. You have to pass the test for the technique to work. If you don’t, then there’s no point bothering with the rest; it’s simply not going to work.
Similarly, for many NLP techniques, the entry criterion is being able to identify driver submodalities for some characteristic. If you don’t achieve that criterion, the rest of the technique is irrelevant. Meanwhile, your failure to achieve the entry criterion does not mean the technique is broken; it simply means you haven’t learned to achieve that criterion unassisted. (Some criteria are easier to achieve than others, especially unassisted.)
This might sound suspiciously like moving the blame from teacher to student. But to use a martial arts analogy, you can’t successfully perform a combination move, if you can’t yet perform the individual moves within the combination. This doesn’t mean the combo is useless, it means you haven’t learned the prerequisites.
Here’s what happens, though, when people try to learn techniques without feedback about the entry criteria: either they accidentally or inconsistently stumble through the criterion, or they mistakenly believe they’ve reached it, when they’ve actually misunderstood the criterion. The former people get results, the latter people don’t.
(i.e., if you already “get” punching and kicking, you’ll master combinations more quickly, but if you’re punching and kicking wrong, it doesn’t matter if you can do the combination of those wrong punches and kicks.)
You can test all this and see for yourself: watch my video and compare what happens when you do and don’t achieve criterion. You can also try teaching it to other people, with and without the criterion test, and see whether it works or not.
You could interpret entry criteria as meaning that “some things work for some people”, but I think this is an error. If you do that, you won’t try hard enough to find different ways to teach.
Hildegard’s hypnotizability research was off-base because it assumed that “hypnotism” was a fixed sequence of exactly-repeatable steps, i.e., that if you tape-record an induction and play it back to a bunch of people, it’s an acceptable test of “hypnotizability”.
In practice, just like everything else, hypnotism is an interactive process with entry criteria. A good hypnotist varies their behavior—timing, rhythm, tone, choice of words or images, etc. -- based on the subject’s real-time responses. They use externally-visible entry criteria to test the subject’s depth and responses, before engaging in suggestions, etc.
I’m not sure if I’m explaining this well. What I’m saying is, Things That Work have testable criteria and include parts that require looking for ways to achieve those criteria, where the ways of achieving the criteria vary from one person to another, but the net effect of getting to the criterion is that you can do something that’s universal or very nearly so.
Achieving those criteria is also an objective matter, even if the perception of those criteria is subjective. That is, you should be able to objectively determine whether something feels a certain way, even if nobody else can observe it on the outside.
(Part of formal NLP training for therapists, however, involves learning to observe the exterior signals of these feelings, so that you’re not dependent on a client’s skills in subjective introspection. I don’t use that in my work, though, because I work long distance without the aid of remote video.)
Anywho… what I’m trying to say is, you will be able to tell whether you’re experiencing a placebo effect or not, because to achieve entry criterion for a technique, you will have to try some things, and some of them will not work. Your own observation of what personally works or does not work, will provide you with adequate demonstration that it is not just a placebo effect, unless you just so happen to be (un)lucky enough to stumble on the right thing at the very first try. ;-)