by Rami Kantari
February 2011

The "Science" of management training is largely derivative, a mix of military strategy, economics of the firm and engineering of processes. Less frequently than it should, it takes ideas from the field of psychology, and some of them have had considerable influence such as McGregor's Management Styles.

Today, management again seems eager to borrow from the field of psychology. We are all witnessing such trends through extensive NLP seminars worldwide and the Gulf region.

In this article, we are going to illustrate an NLP technique that is used in creating change in self and others. This technique is the Swish Pattern.

The Swish Pattern is often the first submodality pattern taught in introductory NLP career training programs. It is designed both as a starting place to learn about how to use basic submodalities (size, brightness, location, association and dissociation) and how to set up generative change. The Swish Pattern is used to create behavioral changes, going from a present undesirable behavior to a future, desired replacement behavior.

Swish Pattern Steps Choose a current behavior you would like to change.

Choose a replacement behavior.

Create a square picture of seeing yourself (dissociated) having the new behavior. This picture should, when you look at it, give you the good feelings you will have about yourself when you have made this change. Create another square picture of seeing what it is that triggers the current behavior, seeing through your own eyes (associated) and having the feelings that you now have, when you have the old behavior. EXAMPLE: Seeing chocolate and feeling hungry. Once you have this picture let it fade out (or do a break state) before going to step 5.

Now take the big, bright picture of the current behavior (seeing what you saw when it was triggered), and in the lower left hand corner of the picture, put a small dark image of you having the replacement behavior.

Now take the big bright one and make it dark while taking the smaller one in the corner and making it bigger and brighter until it completely covers the whole thing. Then open your eyes and reorient to the room (break state). It is very important to reorient to the room at this point otherwise you could create a chain going from problem state to desired state back to problem state. In other words, you could create a loop unless you break state between the steps.

Repeat step 6 five times as rapidly as possible opening your eyes (breaking state) between each run.

Go back and look at what used to trigger the old behavior and notice how your feelings have changed.

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