Another way to spin a strategy out is to establish one anchor for the beginning of the strategy and another for the end of the strategy; then, collapse the anchors so the beginning and the end become tied together. A man who came to a workshop put on by one of the authors, claimed he'd been trying to go into a hypnotic trance for over 25 years and had never succeeded. He firmly believed it was impossible for him to enter a trance state even though he had been desperately wanting to for all those years. His belief strategy was spun out as a demonstration by anchoring the beginning to the end through collapsing two anchors established for those steps. The man's initial reaction was confusion and some agitation, but within an hour he had (and most importantly was convinced that he had) the first trance experience of his life.
Each of these techniques for interruption is designed to stop the progress of an ongoing strategy so that an intervention may be made by the programmer. The same techniques can be used to stop someone's strategy if the outcomes of that strategy are annoying to you or are being used to your detriment. The subtle "knocking away" or diversion of a person's accessing cues with hand gestures or head gestures, can be used to interrupt a person's strategy if it is important or necessary for you to get the upper hand in a situation, or to gracefully force a shift in the flow or direction of the communication. (Subtle clicking noises made with your mouth tend to be a very effective covert means of causing a change in someone's internal pictures — eye movements can also be covertly directed by indicating, with your own eye movements, which position should be accessed next.)
6.4 Interference Phenomena.
Interference phenomena, commonly called "resistance," "blocks:" "sabotage, " "dissention, " "objections, " and so on, form probably the most frequently encountered obstacles to anyone dealing with human behavior to achieve outcomes. The businessperson, manager educator, therapist, lawyer, politician, etc., must deal with these phenomena, whether manifest as inefficiency, learning disability, incongruence, hesitation, personal problems or conflict.
In the neurolinguistic programming model such experiences as objections, incongruence, and resistance are utilized as valuable tests for the effectiveness of the installation of a strategy. Rather than rejecting interference phenomena as "sabotage," we use them to check on the strategy in operation (whether it is preexisting or newly designed and installed). Interference to the operation of a strategy generally occurs (I) when some other resource (in the form of a representation or a sequence change) is still required for the successful securing of the outcome, or (2) when the strategy is not effective for all contexts in question.
Objections do not mean the programmer has failed in designing a good strategy, but are rather accepted as natural feedback, and utilized to modify the strategy in order to make it more effective. Interference is the result of naturally occurring tests for personal ecology.
If you have elicited or designed and installed a strategy and the strategy does not secure the intended outcome when you attempt to utilize it there are a number of things to check: (Each of these checks should be made, of course, after you have tested to make sure you have not broken rapport.)
1) Calibration of the strategy: Are each of the representational systems involved and are their corresponding accessing cues clearly delineated and at the appropriate order of magnitude?— That is, make sure none of the representations are too weak to work properly. Make sure the designated representational system for each step in the sequence has the highest signal value for the ongoing 4-tuple at that point in time. If, when you anchor, the individual has an internal dialogue that says "This won't work," firing anchor will retrigger this internal dialogue. It is important to maintain the representational integrity of each strategy step (this is the "chain-is-no-stronger-than-its-weakest-link" aspect of strategies). If the representational systems in question are lacking in amplitude, work on fine tuning the strategy steps by having the individual exaggerate or practice the appropriate accessing cues and by consciously focusing on the designated representational systems.
2) Make sure the transitions between the steps in the strategy are smooth enough that they do not interrupt the flow of the sequence. If the individual does have difficulty with some of the transitions, have them rehearse the synesthesia patterns until they become more adept.
3) Congruency Check:
a) Clearing personal history: Make sure the individual is congruent about achieving the desired outcome. Compare the specific outcome against the meta outcomes of the individual, or organization, to make sure that it is compatible and ecological. Many times an individual will, at earlier times in his personal history, develop negative anchors for some outcome that later on he desires to attain. Other times, reaching a particular outcome will lead to the possibility of accessing other experiences and outcomes that the individual is not yet prepared to accept or face. In this case the programmer will need to either (1) modify the outcome so that it does not present any threats to the personal ecology of the individual, (2) integrate the negative 4-tuple from the past with the one that desires the outcome in the present context (by anchoring them sequentially and then collapsing the anchors) so that it no longer presents any interference, or (3) access and add in other resources from the individual's personal history that will allow him to handle or avoid any problematic residual effects of the outcome. (See Patterns II and The Structure of Magic II for more material on congruency.)
b) Make sure none of the steps anchor multiple responses. Are all of the steps specific enough that they do not generalize and anchor more than one strategy that is vying for prime control? If this occurs, check the context markers (or design and install one) at the decision point, the operate-or-exit point of the strategy (see design).
4) Make sure all steps are in the appropriate order and that no representational system important for the task has been left out. a) If the strategy has been designed, check it against the well-formedness conditions, and/or access additional resources from the client's personal history, b) If the strategy was elicited, go back over the elicitation procedure to make sure no steps have been mistakenly left out or added in.
6.41 Reframing
Reframing is one of the most fundamental technique/concepts of NLP and is the most effective tool for dealing with interference. The process of reframing changes how some representation, or, indeed, any part of a system, fits into that system as it functions in varying contexts. In doing so it transforms what previously have seemed to be blocks to the operation of the system into resources. The essential goal of reframing is to create a framework in which all parts of the system become aligned toward achieving the same meta-outcomes (ie., the survival, protection, growth, etc., of the system) by accepting and acknowledging all aspects of the system (positive or negative) as valuable resources to the system, given the appropriate context.