Why Hasn’t Any NLP Book Really Focused On THIS Essential Characteristic We Have?

I don’t really know how to call it.

Is it a quality, an attribute, a characteristic, a skill, a capacity, a tool, a currency?

Can’t tell ya.

What I CAN tell you is how fundamental a role this bogaboogle plays in our everyday life and how we barely notice it.

Notice. Ha Ha. Kind of a pun.

We use the word all the time and yet we don’t really focus on it to flesh out its meaning.

Oh, you want to know what it is? Oh, OK.

It’s attention.

Attention.

What the heck is that?

How many times in your life have you told someone or someone has told you to “pay attention?”

We’re so used to hearing this that we do it without even stopping to understand the currency we’re paying with.

You’ll feel something different with these exercises

To this day, I’ve never read anything as richly descriptive of attention as Carlos Castañeda’s works. Attention is the bedrock of your model of the world. It’s the bedrock of your state. And yet, we don’t give it so much as a fleeting thought. We don’t pay attention to attention.

To leverage classic NLP, let’s denominalize the word. You get the verb “to attend.”

OK, but isn’t that word associated to classes and concerts. What does “to attend” mean?

Stop and attend to this post. You already are attending to this. Now, attend to the weight of your body resting either on your butt (if you’re sitting), on your feet (if you’re standing) or on your back (if you’re laying down). Now attend to a random object around you.

How do you make that happen? It’s trippy as heck when you stop to focus on it, isn’t it?

Seems like something beams out of us. Something we grab the world with. Some sort of a hook. It shines a spotlight and brings back whatever was in the way. Kind of like a sonar. An awareness gun.

And you can attend visually, auditorily, kinesthetically, olfactorily and gustatorily.

This is where modeling starts

Ever read about generalization, distortion and deletion anywhere? These were the three general modeling patterns that Grinder and Bandler identified in The Structure of Magic. These three terms, from my research, don’t appear in any other work or field. Apparently, they were devised by the two co-founders of NLP.

Modeling begins here because your attention has a limited scope. There’s only so much you can pull into your awareness. A great analogy for this is a TV screen. The screen has a limited scope; there’s only so much you can fit on it. Some of the action happening is going will stay off the screen.

So it’s critical that you select carefully what will be featured on the screen. Of course, some information will be left out. That’s the way it goes. When you pick up five cards from a deck, forty-seven remain on the table. Deletion is a consequence of selection. To this day, I don’t know of any NLP trainer that makes this distinction. Learn it well.

Conscious vs. unconscious attention

While your attention shines a light with limited scope on the world that surrounds you, and gives you conscious access to a narrow band of stimuli, your unconscious attention picks up and registers all the rest. This is to say that conscious attention picks up the stuff that goes on the screen. Unconscious attention, on the other hand, picks up the stuff that stays off the screen.

Castañeda is the most popular source of descriptions and exercises for developing the unconscious attention. I strongly recommend his work as an introduction to unconscious attention. But watch out! When you first begin training your unconscious attention, you will feel VERY trippy.

Learn as much as you can about attention and, most importantly, exercise yours. It is far and away your most important asset not only as a Practitioner of NLP but also as a human being. It’s your first line for defining what goes into your Model of the World and what stays out of it.