VI. INSTALLATION
As we approach the final section of this book, we are approaching the end of what may be viewed as the second act in a three-act play. Some appropriate portion of your life experience prior to reading this book is act one, in which the main characters are introduced, the plot is established, and the tempo and pitch of the action have risen to create exactly the right degree of anticipation for act two. "Live" theater, for over 2,500 years, has provided one of the most powerful and exciting forms of entertainment available to the human species. The sensory encounter with living people— surrounding us in the audience as well as on stage — allows us to experience a range and variety of synesthesia patterns that we've learned to appreciate and value in the context of that altered state of consciousness commonly called "vicarious" experience.
In the second act of our play — this book — the characters and their interactions are revealed to a depth and extent not available to us on the level of act one, generating new levels of meaning to the dialogue, gestures and facial expressions of the characters and setting the stage for the launching of the most powerful act in the drama . . . act three. Under the impact of the insights, dialogues and outcomes of act two, the action in the third act takes a quantum jump to a new dimension of experience, leading the protagonist to the denouement of your choice — a meta-choice if you wish.
For weeks prior to the first public performance of a stage play, the actors and actresses of the cast rehearse their lines before the watchful eyes and ears of the director, who may insist on certain body movements, gestures, facial expressions, tones of voice, rate and volume of dialogue delivery and so forth to generate maximum effect in the eventual presentation before a "paying" audience. The function of a director, in part, is to recognize, elicit and utilize the talent resources of each member of the cast to maximize his or her performance. A discriminating theater-goer decides to attend a play as much on the basis of who the director is as well as the cast and author.
During rehearsal members of the cast anchor their on-stage entrances, exits, movements and dialogue lines to particular cues —words or actions immediately preceding their own "parts"— until each scene and act flow as smoothly as the ongoing life experience it represents and emphasizes. The purpose of all preliminary work is to embed, to disguise, to render magically invisible in the flow of the performance another and more fundamental set of cues: a sequence of culturally rooted visual and auditory stimuli that evoke appropriate combinations of audience 4-tuples. By controlling the sequence, tempo, timing, variation and magnitude of audience internal kinesthetics during a stage play, the actors and actresses play their audience much as a musician plays an instrument. If it is done well, both the audience and the cast thoroughly enjoy their shared experience.
Whether art imitates life or life imitates art, effective installation is like the preparatory work that is integral to a successful performance. The NLP practitioner, like the director of the play, insures that all cues are appropriately anchored and that each member of the cast has rehearsed until his performance is exactly tuned to achieve the desired outcome — only in this case you will write the script for your own third act.
6. Well-formedness conditions for the installation.
There are two basic ways to install a strategy sequence that you have designed: (1) through anchoring and inserting the steps of the strategy and (2) through having the client rehearse (a form of self anchoring) the strategy sequence. Although these two methods will be treated separately as we initially present them, they are best utilized in conjunction with one another — firing off the anchors you have established as you "walk" the person through the strategy-The goal of installation is to make the strategy you have designed function as naturally and automatically as the existing strategy you are replacing. Each step in the strategy must automatically trigger the next. There are two major well-formedness conditions for installation that you will be testing for to insure that you have done effective work:
1. The entire strategy sequence must be available to the client as an intact unit — so that each step is automatically tied to the next.
2. The strategy sequence must be tied to the appropriate context —so that it is wired (anchored) to some stimulus (context marker) within the context that will initiate the strategy when that stimulus is introduced. This is to insure that the strategy will initiate itself at the appropriate time.
To install a strategy effectively you will have to interrupt or break the existing strategy at the appropriate place so that the new one may be inserted. Generally this is just a matter of timing, so that you begin the new strategy at the place in the existing sequence where the old strategy would have gone into operation. Sometimes, however, you will have to purposefully interrupt the existing strategy (if the synesthesia patterns are too ingrained or the strategy operates too quickly) before the new one can be effectively installed.
As you install the strategy you will also want to test its ecological fit. (This can be done by finding the outcome sequitur). If you try to install a strategy that is somehow inappropriate or maladaptive for the client you will encounter interference phenomena such as resistance to the strategy or "sabotage" of the installation process.
6.1 Installation Through Anchoring.
In the Utilization Section of this book we discussed how anchors could be used to establish and elicit either full 4-tuple representations of an experience, or could be used to selectively access one particular portion of a 4-tuple. The use of anchors in strategy installation involves the anchoring of a selective sequence of individual representations over time. Just as anchors may be used to access either one or more parts or the whole of a 4-tuple, in the utilization of strategies, so may they be used to access either parts or the whole of a particular strategy sequence for installation purposes. An entire strategy sequence may be anchored with a single anchor, or the programmer may selectively anchor single steps or subroutines (synesthesia patterns).
A major difference, however, between the use of anchoring in utilization procedures and the use of anchoring in installation is that, in utilization, you want to use anchoring for controlling the content of particular strategy steps. In installation you want to control the strategy step itself. What you will want to anchor for installation purposes, then, is not any particular content, but rather the act of using the particular representational system required for the step. You will want to establish your anchors so that they gain access to the use of a particular representational system, or established sequence of representational systems.
As we discuss the various methods of utilizing anchors in installation procedures we will be using the symbol, "∮" to represent an anchor. This symbol means that an anchor has been established for whatever bracketed representational system or sequence follows it. ∮ [Vi] indicates that an anchor has been established that initiates access to internal activity of the visual representational system. It will be assumed that the anchor indicated by the symbol is unspecified with respect to which representational system it has been established through, unless this is specified by a superscript, if ∮ Ke would indicate a tactile kinesthetic anchor (such as a touch or squeeze), ∮ Aed would indicate a verbal anchor (a word), ∮ Vc would indicate an anchor in the form of a constructed visual image and so on.