Editor's Note: Dr. Bob Bodenhamer is an innovative NLP theorist and highly respected trainer. Together with Dr. L. Michael Hall, he cofounded the Institute of Neuro-semantics and wrote The User's Manual for the Brain (Bancyfelin, Wales: Crown House Publishing, 2001), Figuring Out People (Bancyfelin, Wales: Crown House Publishing, 2000) and Adventures with Timelines (Cupertino, CA: Meta Publications, 1998). All three books are highly recommended for the serious NLP practitioner and researcher. View a 60-second clip of Dr. Bodenhamer teaching the Meta-Model.

For the past ten years I have poured my life into learning NLP and applying it in the therapeutic, teaching and writing world. Over the past ten years I have had the honor of working with approximately 600 therapy clients involving approximately 3000 hours of therapy. I have also had the unique privilege of teaching NLP at Gaston College for the past seven and one-half years. In addition I have taught seven Practitioner Certification Courses and four Master Practitioner Courses. The numbers of one-session seminars I have led are too numerous to count.

Needless to say, the past ten years have been quite eventful. What a joy and privilege life has afforded me with all the above experiences. Well, so what? That is a question I have been asking myself. So what? If I were to take all the above and summarize it down to its essence (according to Bob of course), how would I summarize what I have learned into one article?

Now, since the major thrust of the work I do involves assisting therapy clients and class participants toward positive change, I will direct the following remarks to what I believe is the essence of personal change from the structural viewpoint of NLP and Meta-States as developed my L. Michael Hall, Ph.D. We call the merged fields of NLP and Meta States, Neuro-Semantics. What were the key elements in the lives of those countless hundreds whom it has been my privilege to work with that brought about positive changes in their lives?

Seven Key Structural Elements Involved in Personal Change:

In this article I will provide the groundwork by defining some basic beliefs we have in Neuro-Semantics about just "how" your brain works. Note the word "how." That word is important. In Neuro-Semantics we place prime importance on the mental processes that determine behavior. What do you do inside your head in order to have a problem and what do you have to do inside your head in order to "fix" your problem? What kind of pictures, feelings, sounds and word meanings do you need inside your head in order to do the problem? What kind of pictures, feelings, sounds and word meanings do you need to activate in your head in order to not to have the problem? By the way, we believe that brains aren't broken; they just run sick thought patterns really well. Indeed, the brain doesn't care whether or not you think yourself sick or whether you think yourself well. Your brain just does what you tell it to do. This is what this article is about. Those who change their thinking understand and accept these beliefs:

1. The brain primarily processes information from the outside world through the five senses. You experience your world through what you see, hear, feel, smell and taste. Now, importantly to Neuro-Semantics, we believe that when you re-present your world on the screen of your consciousness, you utilize the same programs involved in the event of recall. When you recall something you have seen before, you will recall it with a picture (Visual). When you recall something you have heard before, you will recall it with remembered sounds (Auditory). The same is true for feelings (Kinesthetic), smells (Olfactory) and tastes (Gustatory). We call these the Representational Systems or VAK for short.

Your brain not only does this with remembered experiences, it does the same with constructed experiences. I can ask you to imagine seeing yourself where you want to be one year from now. Your brain knows how to construct a picture of the desired you one year from now.

Now, these experiences we re-present on the screen of our minds (images) often contain more than just one system. We can recall a picture and also have sounds with it as well as feelings. Furthermore, these images have finer qualities. Usually images that we hold as very important to us will be very close to our eyes visually. They will often be very bright and colorful to let us know this image is important.

2. The brain gives meaning to these images with words. So, I have pictures, feelings, sounds, smells and tastes in my mind, so what? Your brain doesn't stop there, as a thinking class of life; the human brain has the marvelous ability of giving meaning to these images with words. These words are "about" the images composed of pictures, sounds, feelings, smells and/or taste.

3. The brain doesn't stop at just the first level of word meaning you gave to the image. Your brain keeps having thoughts (primarily with words) about thoughts. The brain does not stop at one thought, it continues having thoughts about thoughts and there is where the "magic" lies. In Neuro-Semantics we realize that as important as Representation is, there is yet something more powerful and more magical--Reference. That's how the brain works. It starts with a referent experience, the event. Something happens. Then we re-present it on the screen of our mind with the Representational System (VAKOG). But by reflexive awareness, we develop a thought and a feeling ABOUT it, now we have our first frame of reference.

4. Repeating thoughts will create unconscious frames-of-mind that will direct our consciousness to the five to nine items we can focus on. These frames of mind operate inside our head totally outside of consciousness. Our brains do not stop at just one thought. It will keep on thinking thoughts about thoughts. These thoughts about thoughts when habituated (drop into the unconscious) become our Frames of Mind--our perceptual filters through which we view our world. These frames become like eyeglasses through which we view and experience our world. And that doesn't end it. We develop frames-within-frames, each frame embedded in another frame.

These higher frames determine our neuro-semantic states that governs the way we think, feel, our health, skills, everything. All the while we are having thoughts about thoughts, these thoughts are interaction with our physiology through our central nervous system and out of that interaction comes what we call "states" of being. And, out of our "states" of being comes our behavior. Thus, "as a man thinketh, so is he" (Proverbs 23:7).

These "repeated" unconscious frames of mind become our blessing or our curse. In problem framing, we can have frames of mind that say, "I am worthless." "I can't ever do anything right." "In order for me to have personal worth, I have to do for other people; I am not an OK person in myself." Etc. Such frames inevitably come from our earlier years and for that reason become quite unconscious and difficult to change on our own. However, they are changeable and they do change for they are just thoughts no matter how much they operate outside of consciousness. In "fixing" ourselves, metaphorically we delete those old frames of mind and install new frames of mind that serve us. This is what Neuro-Semantics is all about.