Understanding Values, Criteria, and Beliefs in NLP

This article introduces a new model for exploring the structure of beliefs, developed at the Centre International des Etudes Avancées de Neuro-Linguistic Programming in Paris. It was created in response to Europeans frequently asking: “How are all these categories connected: criteria, complex equivalence, presuppositions, and beliefs? What’s the benefit of learning how to define a value by complex equivalence or by criterion?”

Why focus on beliefs and criteria? Because people are a walking combination of criteria serving their own beliefs. If you can recognize the structure of your own beliefs, you can actually do something about them. This is a revolutionary idea. Many psychological, philosophical, and spiritual disciplines talk about separating personality from behavior. But when you start talking about separating personality from beliefs, you often find yourself metaphorically tied to a stake in the village square. Still, the search for a model of personality is a core pursuit in NLP.

Question: Can we describe in a few words what drives another person?

Challenge: Can we find a way to elegantly summarize the complex nature of human personality using a limited set of characteristics?

Some of us currently use models like Leslie Cameron-Bandler’s “Imperative Self,” Andreas’ “Core Beliefs,” Dilts’ “Neuro-logical Levels,” and Charles Faulkner’s “Operating Metaphors” to define personality structure and reflect the content of beliefs. The idea is that if you can discover or formulate a person’s “real question,” “core belief,” or “graphic metaphor,” you might understand what makes up their personality or what drives their behavior. This can be described as the search for another person’s model of the world, which is the topic of this article.

All these approaches aim to reveal how content is organized to reproduce personality and offer models or versions of how belief content works for a specific person. The content of these studies inevitably involves examining values, judgments, and criteria-based choices. No matter how much we talk about never making value judgments and only creating structural descriptions (which is itself a value judgment!), it seems that, first and foremost, we need a common language and vocabulary to talk about beliefs. Then we can discuss the content of beliefs regarding a person, their environment, family, or culture. There are already many models of belief content in the works of Clare Graves, Lawrence Kohlberg, Abraham Maslow, and others—everyone who tried to create a structural model but was equally influenced by the cultural presuppositions of their society.

Here, we’re looking for a new model using the standard set of NLP definitions. This can simply be seen as a reorganization of many terms we’ve all used in NLP for 18 years. And this brings great explanatory and practical power. My students feel more competent when interacting with the whole world of “why?”

So, what is this about? When you ask “why?”, the answer you get is a combination of criteria and beliefs. “Why?” has never been a “bad” question in NLP. The issue is that most people don’t know what kind of information they’re extracting and therefore don’t know how to understand or handle the answers they get. Remember, we’re in the linguistic arena of “snow” and the Eskimos—the more distinctions we make in our environment, the more choice and power we have.

The Model of Subjective Experience Structure in NLP

If there’s a model that’s central to NLP, no matter where it’s taught, it’s the diagram below. These distinctions are implicitly present in all our discussions about the structure of subjective reality.

• I.S. – Internal State: Emotions, sensations, feelings.
• E.B. – External Behavior: Body language, voice.
• I.P. – Internal Processing: Thought sequences, strategies.

Context influences different components of experience. This “fried egg” represents the general categories of research in NLP. It’s an arbitrary organization of subjective experience, but a very useful one.

If you’re going to get to know another person, you’ll first observe their external behavior. That’s really all you can do. No one can truly know another person’s thoughts, feelings, or beliefs, because no one can occupy the same place, position, moment in time, personal history, or criteria as someone else.

This is the “behaviorist dilemma.” John Watson, B.F. Skinner, and their team noticed this problem decades ago. They said, “Well, you can’t open up a person and objectively study their thoughts and feelings as if these phenomena were sealed in a ‘black box.’ Since we can’t open it, let’s just forget about it and study only external behavior.”

NLP, thanks to the above model, managed to open this black box. In NLP, this is called calibration. What do we do when we model? We study the relationships between external behavior and the rest of subjective experience.

This “fried egg” is a cybernetic model. All its elements are interconnected. Calibration is the study of the relationships between changes in the components of experience in the NLP model. If you change the internal state, it shows up in external behavior: people move differently, muscle tone, breathing, skin tone, and pace change. If you change internal processing, eye movements and gestures change synchronously. If you change beliefs, you feel, think, and act differently.

Beliefs and so on are on the perimeter of this model because our criteria and values form not only the standard blocks of our metaprograms but also the essence and boundaries of our personality.

Our beliefs represent the boundaries of our identity, the limits where we end and others or the outside world begin. Beliefs and values serve as passive filters, allowing us to perceive, distort, exclude, or generalize the world according to our unique personality. They also serve as doorways or very active filters, letting us evoke, interpret, and, as some would say, create what happens beyond our specific models of the world.

Example

We needed to buy a new car. I wanted to buy a Volvo. My French wife said, “There are no Volvos in Paris and no repair shops. How will we fix it?” I found a Volvo dealership. We bought a Volvo. My wife came home after her first day driving around the city and said, “Brian, today I saw twenty Volvos in Paris and two repair shops! Where did they all come from?” The criterion for this car brand suddenly became important for my amazing wife. As a result, she started filtering all the cars she usually saw in Paris in a new way.

If you’ve spent a couple of days studying NLP, the above information is probably familiar. But what about the outer area—beliefs, criteria, complex equivalence, and values? How are they different? How do they relate to this model?

Complex Equivalence

It all starts with complex equivalence (CE), which is on the ground floor of experience in our new criteria model. Complex equivalence is a process of perception. But we tend to assign “meaning” to what we experience. So, the general definition of CE is any experience to which we’ve assigned meaning. Remember, experience itself has no special meaning. Meaning is what people take and apply to experience.

On the edge of our perception of the world are our senses. So, we connect our experience by saying, “I see, hear, feel, smell, taste something.” We do this both outside and inside our bodies. These features of complex equivalence create permeable “walls” between external behavior (see, hear, feel, etc.), internal processing (I think I see what you mean), and internal states (Oh, I like this!). Thoughts are sequences of sensory representations; emotions are experienced as molecules of representations and/or meta-kinesthetics.

Criteria

When we use abstractions instead of sensory language to describe what is meaningful and important to us, we use criteria. “Good” isn’t proven by anything. We use sensory-based experience to identify and define what is good for us. But criteria are only useful in a given context. What’s good in the context of a hot dog is different from what’s good in the context of cars, women, diamonds, or paintings. Technically, criteria are contextually significant complex equivalences.

We often use a set of criteria to define some important criteria. For example, we might use “truthful,” “honest,” “smart,” and “brave” to define what makes a “good” man.

Let’s look at a simple example. Take the criterion “expensive” in the context of “pens.” In class, I pull out a Bic and ask students, “Is this what you’d call an ‘expensive’ pen in the context of this classroom in France?” Everyone says, “No!”

Then I grab someone’s Mont Blanc pen: “Is this an ‘expensive’ pen?” Everyone shouts, “Yes!” Then I ask the NLP question: “Okay, group, how do you know?”

They shout: “Because I see the small Mont Blanc logo in the shape of a white star,” “Because I heard it costs more than a thousand francs,” “Because I can feel how the gold nib writes.” I say, “Oh, so you have experiences that are equivalent to ‘expensive’ for you in the context of a pen. You even have a multiple complex of experiences that is your personal definition!”

• Context: Pen
• Criterion: “Expensive”
• V: Logo
• A: Price
• K: Feel

Thus, criteria and complex equivalences are interconnected. A criteria equivalence is more general, abstract, and digital. A behavioral complex equivalence is more analog—it’s the body language or actions we expect to see, hear, or feel that match our criteria, often qualities like “trust,” “understanding,” “respect,” or “likable.”

Presuppositions

The technical definition of presuppositions is what will be true in someone’s model of the world for any meaningful statement.

Meta Model I, II, and III, and the Milton Model are ways to determine how people organize their criteria and complex equivalences into linguistic maps of presuppositions in everyday life.

There are four main categories of both inductive and deductive presuppositions: existence (e.g., nominalizations, lost performatives, deletions), possibility (mind reading, unspecified verbs, comparisons), again complex equivalence (remember, CE is the process of assigning meaning), and cause-effect relationships. Essentially, presupposition is a shorthand way to talk about all the above models. This is usually “Master Practitioner” material. But if you’re aware of your presuppositions, you can easily handle all the other models.

Beliefs

In NLP, my teachers always distinguished between everyday beliefs and “behavioral beliefs,” or those that generate action in the world. A belief, of course, is the organization of all the above concepts. “The sky is blue” is a belief. “Sky” is a nominalization for reflected light. “Is” is an unspecified verb. “Blue” is a lost performative. The presuppositions in this sentence imply the existence of the sky and blue, the possibility of something being a color, your CE for blue, and so on. But this sentence isn’t what we’d call a behavioral belief.

“I like it when the sky is blue” is more like a behavioral belief. Here, the person will be oriented toward seeking blue skies. This statement triggers behavior.

Metaprograms are the fundamental distinctions we use to unpack beliefs in NLP. Classically, metaprogramming is defined as the process of creating a model of the structural patterns a person uses to build, maintain, and reinforce their own subjective reality.

Metaprograms describe how a person maintains the set of criteria they call “I.” A metaprogram is a model of the current interaction of a person’s criteria and presuppositions, along with their own sorting principles, functional processes, and operational orientation within a specific context and time. It’s the way experience is filtered and created.

Stable metaprogram patterns create and maintain consistent personal congruence with behavioral presuppositions, which can be called personality or identity.

Beliefs are formed from personal experience. How is it that out of all our life experiences, one creates a belief and another doesn’t? That’s a question of your metaprogram and the set of criteria you call your “self,” because one experience is easy for you to process and another isn’t. For example, some people are motivated by safety and predictability (sameness, away-from motivation, avoidance, and necessity), while others are attracted to the new and unpredictable (difference, toward motivation, approach, and possibility). Thus, some categories of experience are more important to us than others, which leads to the question: “What are values?”

Values

The final component of this model is value. Most people are pretty careless in using the terms “criteria, beliefs, and values.” But if you look in the dictionary and remember your meta model and metaprogram functions, it’s really simple:

“That quality of a thing by which it is regarded as more or less desirable, useful, honorable, important, etc.; worth or degree of worth.” Webster here is talking about comparisons.

If everything is equally valuable, then nothing is valuable. Gold is valuable because it’s rare. One thing is more or less valuable than another on a continuum, scale, or range of value. In NLP, evaluation is the human process of creating hierarchies.

Therefore, values are everywhere in our model of beliefs. One experience or CE can be more valuable than another. Some criteria, presuppositions, or beliefs may be preferred over others. People need value hierarchies, or they’d never be able to make decisions.

So, you now have a complete model of the material important for your model of the world. Did I miss anything? If so, please write to me.

Here’s the final diagram. This is what one of my students and I use to think about “what to do when,” matching different NLP techniques to the various logical levels of this model.