Milton Model of Language

Milton Erickson was a Hypnotherapist in Arizona. He can perhaps be credited as the person who made hypnotherapy acceptable in western medicine, using it in a wide range of situations and helping patients that other therapists had declared 'incurable'. Erickson had suffered from polio in his early life and found himself able to spend many long hours paying attention to the effect that words had on people.

Erickson's language was structured to gently influence the listener, almost like hypnosis but without the stereotypical 'trance'.

In a normal conversation, language has both structure and content. The content gives you facts and the structure connects those facts together into a story.

For example, if a story contains the facts 'cat', 'dog' and 'tree', there is nothing to tell you what is actually happening. The chances are that you have already imagined what is happening in this story, so your mind has unconsciously filled in the missing information based on your prior experiences.

NLP's Milton Model of language works in this way, giving you the structure but no facts. The listener has to insert the missing information from their own experiences and the result is something that is absolutely unique to each listener.

This process wasn't invented by Milton Erickson, he was simply the role model for it in NLP. If you listen to any statement prepared by a politician, you may hear something similar. For example:
"People will understand that the solutions to these kinds of problems are to be found not in the past but in the future, and everyone will appreciate what a difficult task this can be. You can also be absolutely certain that the government we have now is in a far better position than any other to tackle these problems and to resolve them in a way that is economical, effective and respectful to the local community."

Does that sound familiar? Perhaps you remember hearing that before, about asylum seekers, or racial problems, or local policing policy? It sounds like it says something, but when you look carefully at the words, it says nothing at all. Unfortunately, many people have prior experiences of politicians which make them interpret such vague words as being 'manipulative' or judging such statements as 'sound bites', and it is vital to bear in mind that a political context is entirely different to a training, coaching or therapeutic relationship.

Milton language is a framework within which the listener can place their own meaning which becomes totally unique and personal to each listener.

Using Milton language enables you to communicate in a very personal way to a diverse audience, and it also allows a NLP Practitioner to communicate very effectively with his or her clients.

Uniquely and crucially, Milton language enables NLP Practitioners to coach clients without knowing specific details about the presented issue. This means that a Practitioner can help a client to achieve change without having to go into factual details about an issue that could be embarrassing or even traumatic to describe.