Introduction

Over the past two years, I have greatly enjoyed conducting NLP trainings in Russia. I’ve found that Russians are eager to learn, and the participants are enthusiastic and capable students. I’ll be returning in June to lead a 21-day Master Practitioner course in Russia.

It’s both a challenging and fascinating task to present this complex material—directly related to language patterns—to people who speak a language I barely know. During the Master Practitioner course, I’ll spend several days introducing some of the more common language patterns. We’ll see what translates and what doesn’t, and hopefully discover patterns unique to Russian that don’t work in English.

As a preface, I’d like to share one or two language patterns with you here, specifically how to move limitations and resources through time by shifting verb tenses. You’ll learn how to do this in ways that require your listener to recode their experience in order to understand what you’re saying.

In this article, I’ve italicized terms that are specific NLP jargon. If you’re familiar with NLP, you’ll recognize them. If you’re new to NLP, you may want to look up their meanings.

Our field is called Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP is closely related to linguistics. At its simplest, NLP is about how language patterns (linguistic) affect our neurology (neuro), and how our language—and the language of those who cared for us in early childhood—programmed us to code information in certain ways, resulting in specific responses to certain stimuli. NLP is also about how shifts in these language patterns can break old patterns and lead us to recode our experiences, resulting in new choices and reactions.

Verb Tenses

When studying language patterns, verb tense shifts are a great starting point. Every sentence has a verb, so you have plenty of opportunities to practice. When you use verb forms, you guide someone to place events somewhere on their timeline, allowing them to experience the submodalities they’ve coded for that point in time. In this article, we’ll learn to move a present limitation or problem into the past, bring a resource from the past or future into the present or completed future, and associate with a desired state in the present and/or future.

Simple language patterns can create a full spectrum of change, and especially in therapy, it usually takes more than a few clever sentences to complete and stabilize change. However, practicing a complete change—or even a segment of change—using just a few sentences and specific language patterns is a wonderful way to clearly see these patterns and the framework of what we do over longer periods of change work.

Beyond therapy, these patterns can be very powerful in business, when communicating with your children, talking to students, or in any verbal communication. Whenever you use language, you can use language patterns with a specific outcome in mind.

And in those cases where we create complete change using only language patterns, we get to witness the full power of NLP in action.

This article will explore language patterns of time, especially those involving temporal shifts. Let’s start by looking at a simple timeline with different points on it.

We can say “I laugh” (present), “I laughed” (past), and “I will laugh” (future). Read these again and notice your internal experience as if you said each phrase to yourself. How do you code each one? What are the submodalities?

Perfect Verb Tenses

Past Perfect

We can also say “I had laughed” (past perfect), meaning “I had already laughed by a certain point in the past.” Notice how saying this moves the event far into the past. Try this with something else, like “I had been afraid of learning language patterns”—that is, before a certain point in the past. You can try this with any limitations you’d like to push further into the past. The phrase “I had laughed” moves us to a different point in time, when the action was already completed in the past.

However, sometimes this form moves the event too far into the past to be believable. For example, “I have this problem.” So, up until now you had this problem. That doesn’t quite work, does it? And “had had this problem” is even less convincing in this context.

Present Perfect

This is where the present perfect can help. Notice your internal feeling when I say, “So, up until now you have had this problem.” Again, we have two points in time: one in the present, and one just before the present—in the completed present. This is really a moment in the past. Once again, we’ve marked the end of the problem and opened up the future, doing so more elegantly.

“I have laughed.” But at this moment, I’m no longer laughing, and the future is open to other possibilities.

Future Perfect

“I will have laughed”—meaning, at some point in the future, I will have finished laughing. Again, we have two points in time. At some future moment, my laughter will be a thing of the past. This is used when we want to access a resource. It’s a time in the future when I can look back at a moment in the past where I used my resource or was in a desired state, and re-associate with it.

Imagine your own timeline. When you think about the past, how is it coded differently from your future? How do you know what’s past and what’s future? What are the differences in submodalities? Your brain has ways of recognizing what’s real and what’s not.

Recall a limitation you have, and think about it as you read this sentence from Richard Bandler’s work: “What would it be like when you have made the changes now, in the future, as you look back and see what it was like to have had that problem when you think about it now?”

From this most favorable point, your brain must code the change as “real” because it has “already” happened.

“So when you have laughed…”

“So now, when you have had the experience of successfully using verb shift patterns, what will it be like looking back and noticing how much you enjoy having gotten those results?”

The NLP model of change is a transition from the Present State to the Desired State. In other words, it’s about taking a present limitation or difficulty and, through various techniques, attaching one or more Resources until the Desired State becomes the new Present State. At that point, the original Present State has shifted into the past perfect and is dissociated. The resource can come from either the past or the future. If we get a resource from the future, we can use the “As If Frame” (pseudo-time orientation) to experience that resource in the completed future, which, from that point, is in the completed past. The work is done when the client is associated with the Desired State in the present, with additional calibration to the future. When we see this happen in one or two sentences and become flexible enough to fit it into just a few sentences, we not only understand the process better but also gain a more powerful set of tools, and find that our own internal experience moves more quickly toward our results, because as our language changes, so does our internal coding and, therefore, our internal experience. When this happens, language patterns become a natural expression of who we are.

As we learned in the NLP Practitioner course, language patterns are powerful hypnotic language patterns.

One of my favorite inductions using the “As If Frame” involves a verb tense shift: “And notice how good it felt to know what you would be knowing then, now!”

“Would” vs. “Will”

Before I continue with a detailed discussion of patterns, I’d like to point out the difference between “would” and “will.”

“Would” implies something hypothetical. “Will” is a confident statement that something will happen. “Will” is on the timeline. “Would” is somewhere off the timeline. Using “would” can be very useful for avoiding resistance. After all, it’s just a supposition. There’s nothing stopping us from thinking about it that way.

“What would it be like when you have made those changes, now, in the future, as you look back and see what it was like to have had that problem when you think about it now?” (“Would” is translated as the subjunctive mood.)

On the other hand, using “would” after the change is complete can undermine the work. Your calibration to the future becomes more hypothetical than real. Try this yourself and notice your own experience. If I ask you, “Can you imagine what it would be like when you have language patterns fully integrated into your behavior and you are delighted with the responses you are getting from others to your new way of having this experience?”

Now try the same sentences, replacing “will” with “would,” and notice how these approaches differ for you. One word can make a huge difference, and your job as an NLP practitioner is to know as precisely as possible what internal experiences your words will evoke.

Moving Limitations into the Past

It’s often useful to start change work by moving problems or limitations into the past, ideally into the past perfect. This is often used to begin change work. The simplest way to do this is with a Backtrack Calibration statement, confirmed with a Verb Shift. For example:

• “Hello, my name is Sylvia. How can I help you?”
• “I have this problem.”
• “Great! So, up until now this has been a problem for you, right?” or
• “I can see how this has been a problem for you.”

Both of these statements eliminate the problem in the present and open the future for change. In the second sentence, “for you” also opens up the possibility that it was a problem because of the meaning you gave it or how you represented it internally (World Model pattern). Combining these two patterns is often very useful.

It’s important to note that when someone states a limitation in the present, it usually implies the past, present, and future—or, we could say, it exists for them across all time. For example: “I can’t make friends.” As we studied in the Meta Model, this Modal Operator of Necessity is usually also a Universal Quantifier. In reality, it means “never can” in that person’s worldview. This is as much a limitation of experience as it is a description of the present. Until we can open the future to at least “maybe I can,” our work will be constantly sabotaged by the pervasive belief of “never can.”

The magic of verb shifts is that they combine Backtrack Calibration statements and the verb shift itself: “So, John, up until now you haven’t been able to make friends, isn’t that right?”—and the problem is cut off in the past, freeing the future for new possibilities. It no longer permeates all time categories.

Exercise

The only way to really master these patterns is to use them, and often—especially in practical exercises. The following exercises are excellent, and the more you use them, the more natural these patterns will become for you.

Start with at least two people. Draw a table with six squares:

• Resource
• Limitation
• Past
• Present
• Future

One person randomly assigns the numbers 1, 2, or 3 to the boxes and states a limitation and a resource. The other person quickly, without preparation, guides their partner through the tenses according to the numbers in the table. For example:

1 – limitation in the present, 2 – resource in the past, 3 – resource in the future.

“So, Tanya, you are confused about using verb shifts, and I wonder, if you could look back and discover how many times you have had the experience of actually using verb shifts, even without thinking about it, so that after a few days of practice you will have had much experience noticing and appreciating how effectively you have used these shifts and how satisfying that experience is.”

Be especially careful when working with limitations in the present or future. This isn’t particularly useful in therapy, but it can be extremely helpful for practice. This is your opportunity for creativity and for exploring how to avoid setting limitations in the present and future. In this case, it’s best to make them hypothetical.

Now let’s try:

1 – resource in the past, 2 – resource in the future, 3 – limitation in the present.

“So, I’m wondering, how often you have had the experience of laughing at your problem and how often you will be able to do this in the future as you look back at how your problem would have been now had you been able to incorporate the resource of laughter at that time.”

The more you do these exercises, the more flexible and confident you’ll become in effectively using verb shifts in your work and daily life.

Start listening to your own language. Catch yourself and immediately correct: “I can’t…” becomes “Up until now I haven’t been able to….” “I cry easily” becomes “Up until now I have tended to cry easily.” “I’m afraid” becomes “I have been afraid.”

The next step, of course, is Outcome Setting—now that we’ve freed up the future. Once we have an outcome, we can look back on it as something completed at some point in the future. “So, won’t it be fun, after practicing verb shifts for one week, when you are able to look back on having had that practice and feel comfortable with how successful you have been as you now know you have the skills to use verb shifts effectively now.”

Conclusion

Shifting verb tenses can schematically represent the actual patterns of longer-term change work. We place the limitation in the past or past perfect, recoding the limitation as an already completed, dissociated experience. We move resources and/or solutions into the present and/or future, or access them from a favorable point in the future, allowing us to place them on the timeline as completed past. Now, when they are viewed from the present, they are recoded as “real” and are already “plausible,” expected as part of the future, and experienced as such in Future Pacing work.

An important side effect of studying these patterns is that as you practice and learn to use them systematically and elegantly, you gain the internal experience created by such language use. As your experience continues to change, you’ll find yourself experiencing problems as dissociated in the past, and resources and solutions as associated in the present and future. The more you change in this direction, the more you use language as a natural extension of your internal experience.

“So, having learned these ways of shifting verb tenses, as you experience yourself in the future with these patterns fully integrated in your behavior, what is the most effective thing you will have done to achieve this outcome now?”