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There was an interesting development to a previous blog entry about what I’m listening for when I’m working with a client. It came from a response to it on our members’ forum from Peter Salisbury, who said that when Richard Bandler (the co-founder of NLP) works with a client who has a problem, he has one phrase in his head, which is "How are they doing it"? On the face of it this doesn’t sound so different to what I said is in my head when I begin, “What’s this about?” But I found myself thinking a lot about this subtle difference because I realised how such a short phrase that had flowed so casually from my fingers while typing was actually saying something fundamental about the assumptions that underlie my approach, and, without wishing to speak for Dr Bandler, does the same for him.

For many years I’ve worked on the principle that something doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be plausible – something I think I got from some research from Xerox into how we go about making buying decisions. I’ve found this to be very useful in therapy; the world we live in, and the life we live, is all based on our perceptions. Successful therapy doesn’t depend on us finding the truth about a person’s problem (if there is such a thing), just finding a plausible explanation that satisfies that person will enable them to make a positive change. I've been reading a lot about the psychology of decision making – how we make choices - because it strikes me that if we can understand how the brain becomes convinced of something, and work within that channel, then our interventions will become more potent. In my reading I’ve found that neuroscience has determined that the importance of logic tends to be overstated – we’re not logical creatures after all, we make a lot of our decisions intuitively. What researchers such as Gerd Gigerenzer are elucidating are the rules the unconscious uses to arrive at intuitions that can often out-perform careful cogitation – something that Malcolm Gladwell brilliantly explores in his book, Blink.

These rules and how we can use them in therapy are going to be the subject of a later blog; what I’m planning to describe today seem to me to be strongly related and were first identified half a century ago.