The Power of Choice Points: Building Flexibility in Your Behavior

There are many people who are excellent therapists and lead seminars, but who don’t actually know how they do what they do. They’ll share their thoughts about their process, which can distract your attention from the client they’re working with. If you’re lucky, you might pick up on the subtle cues they use and learn to respond to clients systematically. But most people don’t manage this. Many psychotherapists end up working ineffectively.

What you need to start doing is restructuring your own behavior so you can focus more on your client. As professional communicators, it’s important to create a wide range of sensory experiences by consciously practicing certain communication patterns until they become unconscious and systematic—like riding a bike or driving a car. You need to train yourself to be systematic in your behavior, which requires some time spent on conscious practice. That way, when you see visual access cues or hear visual predicates, you’ll automatically have a choice: to match them, mismatch them, or use any combination you can think of.

Developing a Repertoire for Every Choice Point

In other words, you need a solid, unconscious, systematic repertoire of patterns for every choice point you encounter in your work. These are the moments that repeat in your practice, such as:

• How will I establish rapport with this person?
• How will I respond when they don’t have the information to consciously and verbally answer my questions?
• How will I react to incongruence?

All of these are choice points. Identify which choice points recur in your work, and for each one, have at least half a dozen different responses—at minimum, three. Each response should become unconscious and systematic in your behavior. If you don’t have three ways to respond to situations that arise in therapy, you’re not truly operating from a place of choice. With only one way, you’re a robot. With two, you’re stuck in a dilemma.

Building a Strong Foundation for Flexibility

You need a strong foundation from which to generate choices. One way to build this foundation is to examine the structure of your behavior and your activity in therapy. Identify the recurring points, make sure you have multiple responses for each, and then forget about it. Add one more ingredient—a meta-rule: “If what you’re doing isn’t working, change it. Do something else.”

Since conscious attention is limited, respect that and don’t try to do everything you learned in a seminar all at once—you can’t. What you can do is, for the first five minutes of every third session each day, start by saying, “Before we begin today, there are a couple of things I’d like to know about your general cognitive functioning. Can you tell me what color is at the top of a traffic light?” Ask questions that give you access to their representational systems, and spend five minutes tuning in to the person’s responses so you’ll know what’s happening later in the session under stress. Every Thursday, you might try matching predicates with your first client and mismatching with the second. This is a systematic way to discover what outcomes your behavior produces. If you don’t organize your approach this way, it will remain random. But if you do, and allow yourself to limit your patterns and observe the results, then switch to new patterns, you’ll build an incredible repertoire of outcomes at the unconscious level.

This is the only way we know to systematically become more flexible. There may be other ways, but this is the only one we know right now.