Journals Showcase (Witryna Czasopism.pl)

Agata Zyglewska: I would like to ask you about your method of dealing with people and with what kind of people you work.

Marek Rożalski: Are you asking me what method I generally employ to communicate with people or about the neuro-linguistic programming?

About the latter.

Then you mean the phenomenon that is gossiped about as effective, manipulative and making every single woman take her panties off if she meets a guy who knows NLP, don't you?

That's what you can find on the Internet but nothing specific.

Obviously, people would always be taken in by those panties. When it comes to panties, it immediately becomes most interesting. On the other hand, a great deal of information about human cooperation by means of NLP, seemingly being of little interest, usually goes to a dustbin. Sensation is the most fabulous thing. And this game is played by various dopes, stupid people of different sorts who believe that having bought a hammer they automatically know how to hammer a nail. They go around with this hammer trying to drive glass tubes in concrete. With this hammer they try to bent spoons and also paint walls. Then they drivel on about it. Thus let us leave the sphere of gossip aside as well as the whole media commotion about seduction courses...

NLP is an art not a craft; the art of interpersonal communication and the art of understanding what others tell us. When you talk to me, what you say and what I can deduce from your behaviour is processed in my head according to a certain structure. NLP is about teaching the structure according to which we can understand others better and easier or more effectively communicate what we think of others or what we want others to do. NLP trainers are incredibly pesky as they keep asking about different possible meanings. Often people fail to meet even though they speak the same language. Going deeper into the matters of understanding others, various values, opinions, different levels of communication appear. For example I may ask you: what is being at the cinema about?

You sit, watch a movie and look at the person you've come with.

Really? I never look at anyone but the screen. Then for you being at the cinema is about being together but many people are there individually and after two hours they return to reality. Do you know that a cinema is a place where you experience a complete hypnosis? Thus for many people it means entering into their own private worlds. What is important for you in the cinema?

It is easy to be moved.

Then emotions. And for me it is picture, adventure, speed and connecting various facts, sometimes in a very paradoxical manner. We are at different cinemas. If I kept asking: what people sit at cinemas for? Who am I sitting at a cinema? An enormous amount of information emerges we did not suspect while uttering the sentence. The Rychu Bendler's idea from the 1970s Santa Cruz, California was and still is the most promising attempt to understand other people, influencing them and ourselves basing on their thinking structure. All that nonsense modern psychology goes in for, famous “Would you like to talk about this?” is tragic sticking to the content. Thus our talk about a movie is: a woman pressed a red kiss on a guy's lips, then they went to a café and drank a brown coffee. NLP user, on the other hand, would ask: why? What for? With whom? Using what skills? And what did they achieved in the end? And this is thinking about structure.

For me words are almost meaningless. What counts is the way you are looking at me, how you hold your coffee cup and how you keep nodding. From this I draw conclusions and you probably draw conclusions from the content of words. Once again we are talking about the structure of thinking. If we understand how people work, then we will close to being friends with what is going on inside them without going into the content. If I asked you now to stand up, what would you do?

I would stand up.

But there are people who would think: you stand up, you prick! Some people are motivated by contradiction, others by an aim or agreement. I am motivated by contradiction. When somebody tells me “stand up!” I immediately ask why. If you can't explain it, stand up yourself. There are people reasoning about the world in a certain general way but there are also people operating on an enormous amount of details in order to build a picture. There are people who would lend two times but receiving nothing back they would not lend for the third time and there are others who would lend even for the thirtieth time. This is an inclination, a structure of thinking. Being aware of that places one ten times higher than others because he is able to understand something of this complicated world.

And this is the greatness of NLP which assumes that: we have a computer in our head, i.e. neuro-hardware and in it there are programs, i.e. software. This software is changed by means of a tongue, i.e. a keyboard with one very pink key that you have behind your teeth.

Neuro-linguistic programming is one of the most crude method of thinking about people and the way they communicate and how they pursue their goals. NLP has many basic assumptions. One of the first says: the map is not the territory. Since the times of Bateson and other brave philosophers this idea is unable to find its way to human heads. The thing you have in your mind is significantly different from the exterior. The way you think about me is not true. Your reception of my person is an interpretation. A map can never be a faithful reproduction of reality so there is no truth. There are only individual close-ups and only those can be subject to processing in human mind. But not the truth. So what that your father beat you with a belt when you were little? That is only a map something can be done with it.

Another important principle: a real choice begins with three possibilities. If you have just one possibility you are a fundamentalist, if you have two there is a conflict in you – this or that. The real freedom starts at three. Or take this: if one has learned something, the other is also capable of learning it. Nice? But many people say it is impossible. Or the things like: a more flexible individual becomes a leader. Or: human deeds come from positive intentions. Take for example a thief, a bandit. From his point of view, does he have positive intentions? Ourselves considered, we always have good intentions. We take the best possibility there is for us. Of course, for others it is not necessarily a good thing. People doing the darkest deeds – there always lies some positive intention at the bottom. A statement: there is no failure, only feedback. In NLP we say: a mistake is just a piece of information, if you want to experience something, you have to take a risk. Usual cuts and bruises may appear but you get your information. Well, such way of thinking is quite manipulative, I agree.

Reformulating decides about the greatness of NLP. For example, somebody says: This is too expensive, sir and the shop assistant answers: I agree with you, it's really sumptuous. A tiny thing that moves us to another world. NLP looks always to the future and accepts everything that happened as our foundation. Sometimes these are bricks unevenly laid but generally our life lies in the future so what is the point of discussing what my father did to me with his belt when I was five.

A sense of guilt is rejected then.

What is a sense of guilt?

Well, the recurring awareness that you did something wrong, something against the generally accepted norms.

Oh, here you are. Exactly, there are two feelings: shame and a sense of guilt. Shame concerns overstepping one's own rules and a sense of guilt concerns the rules of others. And here a question appears: do I agree with those rules? Why are those rules to be my own? Why do I have to accept them to live? When you start your work with a sense of guilt it turns out that you in fact work with the sense of your own worth: who am I? Do I have the right to live according to my own rules? The majority of stupid psychologists, by the way it ‘s about 85%, that are capable mainly of asking questions: Would like to talk about it? and whose short-term therapy lasts two years, they come up with the idea that I have to grow fond of the one causing my misfortunes or work them out. They wade into this, reopen old most painful wounds believing that if I do what they told me, my life will change. We have arrived at one of the most dreadful situations concerning modern psychotherapy, that is making things bad so that one is unable to live in peace ever since...

Is NLP a contradiction of...

…this traditional, fucking, Freudian psychotherapy, where people have to suffer and sob in order to work something out. NLP therapy consists in redirecting one's attention from the past into the future so that our whole energy would be focused on achieving a goal. When you ask people to manipulate their heads and see their goals and success and the moment of happiness they will go there. However, if you con them into expectation that everything may cock up, that the ceiling may fall down because they did not clear the roof from the snow then you make them enter a nice place as if it was the ugliest place in the world. And this is that manipulation. Isn't it cool to manipulate yourself into believing that life is beautiful? Even though that's rubbish. You catch yourself on walking and whistling and even though everything will fuck up, you know it's going to be OK.

Do you believe that it is possible to pick anyone and turn him in to this Buddhist-like positive man?

There is nothing against it. Do you know what happens when people start smiling, when sixty-seven places on your face remind you how good you can feel? Sometimes we fool around and with a special tape we stick the corners of the mouth of those who have them turned up. Then I ask them to think about something sad and they can't. Do you know what anchoring is in NLP? It is coupling a stimulus with an emotion. This is a manipulation similar to Pawlov's dog and his bell. It helps to bring certain states and emotions about. If you make such a rose-tainted filter for yourself by means of evoking memories of certain ecstatic states and with such filter you go on a meeting where you have to fix something, you will have a different colour on your face, different attitude, you will put different pieces of information together faster and you’ll believe that you gonna make it. This is that hated, unnatural way of manipulating people by means of NLP. Why not? We have always been doing this, only now it is structuralised.

You can manipulate yourself if you give yourself a green light. Those stories that I can manipulate other people should be done away with. Away with those stories by cute trainers that adin, dwa,tri, now lady take your panties off, I have something important to tell you. It can be done once but NLP is the art of keeping relationships working. If a shop assistant cheats on his client it is obvious that he will never sell him anything again. It always makes me laugh when people believe that one can do something against the will of the other. You can be only with other people. In the time of devilishly fast information you can't lead people where they do not want to go. Every fraudulent advertising campaign leads to a company's collapse. Every male who seeks physical satisfaction only has no chances for a nice and pleasant life with a woman. Such men are good only once.

It is said sometimes that NLP breaks families. But if you want to break up with your guy, then better sooner than later. You save a few years of your life. When by means of NLP tools you come to realise that our values are different: you think about children, I– adventures, that's a frequent conflict, or you want to play your life like an actor on a scene and I long for long walks, holding hands and going to sleep at midnight. What then?

You know, thanks to NLP I learned that compromise is the most atrocious solution. Both sides lose. No one is satisfied. NLP tells you: find a third way out of a situation. My favourite example: you are seeing a man from Gdańsk, a compromise is to meet halfway – in Mława. You are both irritated. The third way is to fly from time to time to Grand Canarie, practically for the same money. NLP helps find a way out of a difficult situation, a goal. When you use NLP tools in order to maintain a close relationship with someone, understand your husband or wife, understand that he only protects a value of his, then, would you believe, how easy life becomes! There are no enemies.

This interview was recorded in March 2006 in Warsaw.

An interview with Marek Rożalski
by Agata Zyglewska
Translated by Anna Skrajna

It was published by (op.cit.,) in the issue no. 1 (28) 2006