Are there any of you who play music? How many people in here can play an instrument? OK. How many of you, when you play something well, play it consciously? ... Exactly. None of you. You are aware of the result, the sounds you are making, but not of the process of making them. And what happens when you become conscious of what you're doing in the middle of playing something? Boom! You mess it up. Yet in order to learn to play that very same piece of music, you went through some conscious steps.

As we are communicating to you here, I am aware in the sense that I respond directly. But I have no reflexive consciousness of what I am doing. If I did, I'd do a crummy job.

Let's say you go back into your office Monday morning and a new client walks in and says "I have a phobia of gum chewing." A little voice goes off inside your head and says "Ah! This is an unprecedented opportunity for me to try to do something new." And then you look up and ask the person "Well, when was the last time that you had a very intense phobic response?" Then they begin to go through certain eye movements and stuff. If you begin visualizing the blackboard up here, and the list of the accessing cues, and talking to yourself about the things you heard us say, and having feelings about whether you are going to be able to do this or not, you will have no sensory information on which to base what you do. That's the sense in which reflexive consciousness in face-to-face communication is not going to be useful. If you have to tell yourself things, and make pictures, and have feelings while you are doing therapy, probably you will end up doing therapy on yourself. I think that's what happens much of the time. Often therapists are not doing therapy with the other human being in the room. They are doing therapy with themselves. And many clients who change, change by metaphor.

Most people in the field of therapy go to school, but they don't learn anything about people that is relevant to therapy in any way. They learn about statistics: "Three and a half percent of clients are..." But you very rarely have a hundred people walk into your office so that you can work with three and a half of them. So you go to workshops to learn how to do therapy. There are a lot of people who are very good therapists who do workshops but who don't know how they do what they do. They will tell you what they think they are doing, thereby distracting you from paying attention to the client they are working with. If you are lucky you will pick up the kinds of cues we're talking about subliminally, and be able to respond out of yourself in some systematic way. However, that doesn't work with a large number of people. There are a large number of people doing therapy unsuccessfully. What you need to begin to do is to restructure your own behavior in terms of paying attention to your clients.

As professional communicators, it seems to me to make a lot of sense for you to spend some time consciously practicing specific kinds of communication patterns so that they become as unconscious and as systematic in your behavior as riding a bicycle or driving a car. You need to train yourselves to be systematic in your behavior, which requires some conscious intervening practice time. So that when you see visual accessing cues and hear visual predicates, you can automatically have the choice of responding by matching, or responding by mismatching, or any combination that you can think of.

In other words, you need a good unconscious systematic repertoire of patterns for each choice point that you have that's going to come up repetitively in your work: How do I establish rapport with this other human being? How do I respond in a situation in which they don't have information consciously and verbally to respond to my question? How do I respond to incongruity? Those are all choice points. Identify what choice points are repetitive in your experience of doing your work, and for each of those choice points, have a half a dozen different responses—at least three, each one of which is unconscious and systematic in your behavior. If you don't have three choices about how to respond to things that occur in the therapeutic situation, then I don't think you are operating out of a position of choice. If you only have one way, then you are a robot. If you have two, you'll be in a dilemma.

You need a solid foundation from which to generate choices. One way to get that solid foundation is to consider the structure of your behavior and your activity in therapy. Pick out points that are repetitive, make sure you have lots of responses to each of those points, then forget about the whole thing. And add one ingredient, a meta-rule which says "If what you are doing is not working, change it. Do anything else."

Since consciousness is limited, respect that and don't go "Good, I'm going to do all those things that happened in this workshop." You can't. What you can do is for the first five minutes of every third interview every day begin by saying "Look, before we begin today there are a couple of things I need to know about your general cognitive functioning. Would you tell me which color is at the top of a stoplight?" Ask questions that access representational systems, and tune yourself for five minutes to that person's responses so that you will know what's happening later in the session under stress. Every Thursday you can try matching predicates with the first client that comes in, and mismatching with the second. That is a way of systematically discovering what the outcome of your behavior is. If you don't organize it that way, it will stay random. If you organize it and feel free to limit yourself to specific patterns and notice the outcome, and then change to new patterns, you will build up an incredible repertoire of responses at the unconscious level. This is the only way that we know of to learn to become more flexible systematically. There are probably other ways. This just happens to be the only one we know about now.

Man: It sounds to me as if you are telling us to experiment with our clients. I think I have a professional obligation to—

I disagree. I think you have an obligation to experiment with every client to make yourself more skilled, because in the long run you are going to be able to help more people more expediently. If, under the guise of professionalism, you don't try to expand your skills and experiment, basically I think you are missing the point and professionalism becomes just one way to limit yourself. Think about "professionalism." If professionalism is a name for a set of things that you can't do, then you are restricting your behavior.

In cybernetics there's a law called the Law of Requisite Variety. It says that in any system of human beings or machines, the element in that system with the widest range of variability will be the controlling element. And if you restrict your behavior, you lose on requisite variety.

The prime examples of that are mental hospitals. I don't know about your mental hospitals here, but in California we've got some real whackos in ours, and we have a lot of patients, too. It's easy to distinguish the staff, because the staff has a professional ethic. They have a group hallucination and this group hallucination is more dangerous to them than to anyone else, because they believe that they must restrict their behavior in certain ways. Those ways make them act consistently, and the patients don't have to play by those rules. The widest range of flexibility is going to allow you to elicit responses and control the situation. Who's going to be able to elicit the most responses—the psychiatrist who is acting "normal" or the patient who is acting weird? I'd like to give you my favorite example.