I often ask people in the seminars that we give, before beginning to teach strategies, “How many people used a strategy today?” I’m interested in how many people will raise their hand, and how many won’t, and usually only a few people raise their hand, because people typically are not aware of their pervasive use of strategies.

Now, a strategy is any internal and external set (order, syntax) of experiences which consistently produces a specific outcome. For example, when I go somewhere, I need to make a picture of where I’m going and how to get there in my mind. And I gather information verbally until I have a clear picture of the entire route that I’m going to travel. When I have enough information, I then forget it and trust my unconscious mind. That’s my strategy for driving somewhere, when I do it successfully. When I don’t do it successfully, it’s usually because I haven’t gathered enough information. So, I don’t have a clear picture, and then I may even take the wrong turn or get lost. Do you use a strategy when you go somewhere? Of course you do, although you may not have been aware of it until this moment. Think of it, what is your strategy? What do you do when you go somewhere?

We use internal processing strategies for everything we do. All of our apparent external behaviors are controlled by internal processing strategies. All of our overt behaviors! So that means that we use strategies for love, strategies for hate, strategies for learning, strategies for math, parenting, sports, communication, sales, marketing, wealth, poverty, happiness, death, sex, eating, disease, creativity, relaxation, attention and fun. There are strategies for everything.

We first develop a particular strategy when we are young. At an early age, perhaps you put a series of internal and external experiences together, and made (for example) a decision. Then, at some point when you knew it worked, you generalized the process that you used before in making the decision and said, either consciously or unconsciously, “OK, this is a good way to make a decision”, and you then probably used it over and over and over again.

Let’s say, for example, you made a picture in your mind and talked to yourself or someone else about it, until you had enough information, and that was how you made the decision. If that syntax worked for you, then at some time you began to use it over and over again.

In our lives, we use strategies for everything that we do. And so the second question I often ask people, in the process of doing a seminar is, “So those of you that didn’t use a strategy yet today, how did you get here?” “How did you get to the seminar?” “And how did you decide what seat to sit in?” So, a strategy is essentially what it is that you do in your mind in the process of doing something.

Since NLP deals with form and not content, we’re not so much interested in the content of the thought, just the form. You might say, “Well, I thought of this”, or “I thought about that” or “I thought of flowers” or whatever you did. Rather than the content, what did you do, did you make a picture in your mind, did you have a certain set of words that you said to yourself? Did you think of somebody else’s voice, or did you have a certain feeling or emotion? Our interest is in the context, form, and process instead of the content.

NLP was created as a result of Modeling. Bandler and Grinder’s system for Modeling was essentially to discover somebody’s belief systems, physiology, and mental strategies. In the process of modeling, they would elicit a person’s internal program, which they called “mental syntax” or “strategy.” In terms of modeling, then, one important element is the internal syntax or what they do inside their head when they do what they do. What strategy do they use?

Now, as an example, let’s see how you might model a foreign language. If you were modeling a language, like French, you’d model three things. First, you’d model the vocabulary, actually learning the vocabulary. You’d learn “plume” means “pen.” Next you’d learn syntax. So, you’d learn how to say sentences in French, putting certain words in certain order. Regarding the order and sequence of words, Tony Robbins is fond of pointing out that “The dog bit Johnny” is substantially different from “Johnny bit the dog.” It has a completely different meaning, yet they’re the same words. But they’re in a different order. The difference in meaning is created by the syntax (order, sequence).

And also in modeling a language, you’d also model the mouth movements. You’d learn how to pronounce “plume” so you could say it with the correct accent.

Modeling mental strategies in NLP allows us to take a strategy from one place and move it to another place. Now, if I’m dealing with content, then it’s hard to move content from one place to another. But if I’m dealing with process, if I’m dealing with the “how to” regarding processing information then I can discover somebody’s internal program and I can install it in someone else.

Another purpose for discovering strategies is that you might want to change someone’s strategy. We talked about this in a seminar that I did recently where a participant had a buying strategy of “see it”, “feel good about it” and “buy it.” So, “I see something I want and I get a feeling right away, and I buy it”, is pretty efficient for making quick decisions, especially if you’re an airline pilot. She felt, however, that it was not really effective for buying because she’d see a lot of things she liked and she bought them. So, she decided she wanted to change the strategy.

Most strategies that people have can be easily learned or modified, according to whatever our outcome is. And that’s why in NLP one of the presuppositions is that people have all the resources they need. For example, if someone is very decisive at home and they have trouble making decisions at work, one of the things we can do is move their decision-making strategy from home to work.

A Strategy is a specific syntax of external and internal experience which consistently produces a specific behavioral outcome, or to put it in plain English, a strategy is something that somebody does in their brain and nervous system that produces a specific result. It’s what somebody does in their head when they do what they do.

An analogy that seems to work really well in describing strategies is the analogy of baking a cake. In the process of baking a cake, you get all the ingredients together, get a bowl, and you put the ingredients into a bowl in a certain order. It’s important to take all the ingredients and put them in a bowl in a certain order. In a recipe, there’s a certain order or sequence of when the elements should go into the recipe. And so, if you put the elements of the cake into the bowl in the wrong order, or even in the oven before you put them into the bowl, you’ll get a substantially different outcome.

A strategy is a specific order and sequence of internal and external processes or internal and external experiences that consistently produce a specific outcome. If you reverse the strategy, that is, if you reverse the order and sequence of the strategy, the outcome that you get may be substantially different.

So, how do you discover someone’s strategy for doing a specific thing? Well, just ask. Just ask, and listen to their predicates, watch their eyes (eye patterns), and make note of the order and sequence of the modalities as they are presented to you.

What are the elements that can go into a strategy? There are only six, fortunately. There are only six things that people can do in their mind — what a surprise. You thought you could do a lot more than six things, didn’t you? There are only six things that you can do, though. The six are pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes, smells, and you can talk to yourself. And you can do each of those things either internally or externally.

If you’re making note of the syntax of the elements in a person’s strategy, we’ve developed a shorthand notation process for strategies. And they’re shown below:

V = Visual

A = Auditory

K = Kinesthetic (feelings)

O = Olfactory

G = Gustatory

In addition we can say certain things about those Representational System elements:

e = External

i = Internal

t = Tonal (At)

d = Digital

c = Constructed

r = Recalled

The strategy notation that we use corresponds directly to the eye pattern chart below. As you listen and watch the person you’re eliciting the strategy from, note first the major modalities — [V], [At], [K],

* , [G], [Ad]. Also make note of whether they are internal or external. For example, seeing a picture in your head is Visual Internal (or Vi), looking at a car to see if you like it is Visual External (or Ve), and may include a comparison to a remembered or created car (Vr or Vc). Talking to the salesperson, and gathering information about the purchase to find if it meets your criteria is Auditory digital (or Ad), and External. Or feeling a rug to discover if you like the feel is Kinesthetic external (or Ke), while feeling good about the purchase is Kinesthetic internal (or Ki).
Making sure that your shorthand notation for each step of the strategy includes the distinction of whether it’s internal or external, we make a superscript, “e” for external and “i” for internal. And when dealing with auditory, you want to make the differentiation between auditory digital [Ad] or auditory tonal [At]. Digital includes lists, criteria — whether it “makes sense”, whereas tonal is more concerned with whether it “sounds right”. Make a subscript of “t” for tonal or “d” for digital.

You will want to note the elements in the order they occur. And, it’s OK to ask over and over again until you have a strategy that you can be confident about. Make several tests. Ask over and over if you need to so you get it right, and you are sure that the building blocks are in their correct order.

The T.O.T.E. Model: Bandler, Grinder and Dilts and others in the book, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Volume I, refer to a model of strategies called T.O.T.E. The T.O.T.E. model was designed to represent how people process information. T.O.T.E. stands for test, operate, test, and exit.

The notion of strategies actually comes from George Miller, and Galanter, and Pribram in a book called Plans and the Structure of Behavior. They’re the ones who originally developed the concept of the T.O.T.E. model.

As the theory goes, a strategy or T.O.T.E. begins with a certain test. It’s a test that actually starts or fires off the strategy. It’s the starting point. As you look at the diagram below, follow along beginning with the word “T.O.T.E.”, where it says “input” (this is where the information comes from for the strategy), and to the right of that, you see the first test.