Chapter 11: Working with the Logical Levels 181
Employing practical uses for logical levels
You can use logical levels to bring energy and focus to many different situa-
tions. Here are just a few examples:
✓ Gathering and structuring information: Compiling a report, school
essay, conducting interviews, or structuring any piece of writing.
✓ Carrying out a modelling exercise: The logical levels offer a practical
framework to start from (turn to Chapter 19 for more on modelling).
✓ Making a career choice: Exploring all aspects of a career move from
ascertaining the best environment, to getting your values met, to how
this job connects with your passion and purpose in life.
✓ Building relationships in a family: Exploring what all members of the
family want for the family to work together. This approach is especially
useful when dramatic change occurs in a family’s structure such as
divorce or remarriage.
✓ Improving individual or corporate performance: Deciding where to
make business changes that help turn around a struggling company or
one going through mergers and acquisitions. Coming up with a develop-
ment plan for an individual employee.
✓ Developing leadership and confidence: Stepping through the levels to
get alignment and feel confident in leading a team or enterprise.
Open any toolbox – whether it’s a box of coloured flipchart pens, a palette
of paints, electric drill bits, or a mechanic’s spanners – and some favourites
always take centre stage. You keep coming back to these faithful friends and
can depend on them for the feel-good factor. You’ll discover that the logical
levels model provides a value-added feature time and time again. The model
is ever-present, like a mate helping to decipher complex information, whether
you need to make sense of a business project or unravel a difficult conversa-
tion. If you keep returning to any single well-loved tool in the NLP toolkit, the
logical levels model may well be the one for you.
Finding the Right Lever for Change
Carl Jung, one of the 20th century’s leading thinkers in psychology, famously
said, ‘We cannot change anything until we accept it. Condemnation does not
liberate, it oppresses.’ And he was right, because the first step to coping with
change is to accept that it’s happening. You’re then in a position to work pro-
actively with the change and give yourself options, instead of waiting to be
on the receiving end of whatever happens to you.