Another important NLP concept is parts. The word “parts” refers to clusters of values, motivations, and other personality traits that tend to work together, a little bit like a personality. In fact, some people call them sub-personalities.

People with a lot of dissociation may have their parts act as full-blown alternative personalities, as in multiple personalities, known as dissociative identity disorder. But for most people, having parts works pretty well. Different situations call for different parts to come to the foreground or be activated.

Parts relate to states. If you get into the right state for a challenge, this helps bring the most appropriate parts forward. Consider playfulness. Let’s say you are on vacation and having a lot of fun at the beach. There, your personality contrasts quite a bit with your personality at work; the beach does not activate your worries, your workplace knowledge, nor your serious side. You are giving that aspect of yourself a rest and just having fun. NLP works with parts to align you towards making a good decision, handling a challenge, or communicating well. NLP can even assist you in negotiating.

Alignment, as occurs when your parts are aligned, brings much value to NLP because it empowers our resources. The most basic alignment occurs when our sense modalities are in harmony. On a larger scale, we become congruent when our parts harmonize. If there is a mismatch, then we have an internal contradiction.

As you’ll recall, parts act like little personalities within us, or clusters of motivation that work together. And ecology refers to parts or other systems supporting each other. So you could say that, in congruence, your parts play well together.

On an even grander level, congruence happens when our alignment points are in a constructive direction that matches our self-interest.

The highest order of congruence takes place when we align all the way up to and include our higher values and aspirations. This extreme alignment brings perhaps the greatest satisfaction a human being can experience.

When you meet someone who is not congruent, that is, incongruent, they tend to say things that don’t quite match up, or their behavior doesn’t match what they say, or their outcomes don’t match what they are trying to do. If you explore this with someone who is incongruent, they will reveal deeper and more obvious incongruities and deeper mis-matches. They may show ambivalence about the results they say they want. They may get a lot of benefits from the status quo by just saying they want to change. They may reveal insecurities about what they are trying to do. They may somehow dislike the kind of person they say they are trying to meet, like maybe feeling angry with all members of the opposite sex. They may have mental health or neurological problems that they have not fully accepted or learned to cope with. They might deny their serious problems with alcohol or other drugs. The list goes on.

Many things can cause incongruence. If you are consulting or coaching someone who has some kind of incongruity, you will want to use NLP strategies that help this person resolve these mismatches. We call this ability to get parts to mesh well “reintegration”.

Congruence is a major concept and concern in NLP. It is a gateway into the spirit of NLP. People are congruent when their body language says the same thing as their words. They are congruent when they are doing what they preach.

This means that a person who benefits from NLP develops a personality and perspective that is congruent with doing NLP for others. People who have improved their performance and resolved personal issues with NLP are much more believable as practitioners. They also have a better gut-level understanding and intuition when practicing NLP. This is key to achieving states that create the higher-order creative solutions characteristic of NLP mastery. It is very evident in the levels of motivation, objectivity, and resourcefulness that such NLP practitioners generate. They are not nearly so much at the mercy of their moods as most, because of their expertise in managing their states to maintain a focus on desired outcomes.

Congruent NLP practitioners are able to generate a mature and realistic sense of commitment. When they commit to doing something, it isn’t because they think they have a guarantee of success. The risk of failure does not cause them to falter, and the fantasy of a guaranteed outcome is not necessary for them to experience high levels of motivation. They generate a commitment to apply themselves that is not contingent on “the universe” cooperating and giving them a boost. This means that they are not substituting metaphysical or superstitious principles for the principles of NLP, expecting some kind of shortcut to success. Bandler famously said it well during his training: “Now open your eyes and look out on the world and say inside your mind, ‘Piece of cake!’”

This means that, by getting out of your own way and generating the proper state, you will not be intimidated by your objectives. More than that, you will experience the power of resourceful motivation. Instead, it becomes a reflex to shift into empowered states as needed. This means being able to generate and amplify resourceful states such as perseverance, curiosity, anticipation, exploration, desire, creativity, and productivity.

When your TV stops working, you do not assume that the TV, cable, and electricity have all stopped working at once, but rather that only one part of the whole is not working. You therefore try the different possibilities to try to determine what exactly the problem is. We can do the same for ourselves.

A dysfunctional system is when part of you makes it difficult to be stable, achieve your goals, or even creates situations that make it more difficult to achieve these goals.

The reason a system becomes dysfunctional is essentially either because its parts are not properly connected or are not connected at all. A person who sees criticism as an attack will have problems making improvements. A group that does not connect praise with reward will not be properly motivated. Similarly, if the employees can only communicate through their boss, it is very difficult to report improper behavior by that boss. In essence, we can say a dysfunctional system suffers from some kind of communication breakdown.

NLP thrives on results. NLP pays attention to how people interpret their experiences so that it can tailor its approach to the individual. NLP can help you have a more meaningful and useful subjective world. That means the world as you interpret or experience it.

Subjectivity means your personal take on what happened; how you react to things internally.

By objectivity, we mean the verifiable information that we can actually account for, like historical or scientific facts.

Ecology is an important aspect of congruence, so let’s review it again briefly. Think of a forest. You probably imagine the trees and some of the larger animals, such as deer, lions, elephants, or wolves (depending on where the forest is).

While they may seem like individual pieces, they are actually small parts of one single system. The trees provide food and shelter for small insects, birds, and mammals, which in turn are consumed by larger animals. Tiny animals and fungi live in the soil that helps the trees grow. If you take away one aspect of this system, the entire structure falls apart.

Furthermore, if you introduce a foreign species to this system, it can either die off very quickly, or be a huge success, which can actually bring down the entire system.

Our minds work very much in the same way as these natural systems. For example, have you ever wondered why some people can drink alcohol often and in quantity and have little effect on their lives, while others drink little and rarely, but that ruins their lives? Just like an invasive species, alcohol can have a little or big impact on a person depending on the environment it is introduced into.

Or maybe you wonder why people change dramatically after losing their job, retiring, or divorcing. Just as introducing a new aspect into a system can disrupt it, so can the removal of an existing aspect. If you took away insects, life on Earth would dramatically decrease, such that humans and thousands of other species would also disappear. So we can see how the health of the environment depends quite a bit on all of the little pieces that make it up.

It is precisely for this reason that NLP uses the term “ecology” to describe the system within the individual. If we do not focus on the system as a whole, even the positive changes we make can create major problems. For example, cats were introduced to Australia as a means to control rodents, but the cats have caused major problems for the native animals. In the same way, being more productive at work can mean less time for friends and family.

When we take a systemic approach, that is, when we look at the ecology of the situation, we can anticipate, mitigate, and properly deal with problems before they happen. Furthermore, when we look at ecology, we can see if one problem is actually a symptom of a larger problem. For example, alcohol might be a symptom of a larger issue, so if you only deal with the alcohol aspect, while you do improve the situation, you do not necessarily take the person from a negative to a positive one, you merely make it less bad. NLP is not interested in making people less “bad.” NLP is interested in bringing out the excellence in all of us, and ecology is fundamental to doing this.

Do you remember the Cartesian coordinates? You can apply Cartesian coordinates to decisions in order to check your ecology and refine your outcomes. You can try this on a decision you’re considering. Here they are: If I do X, what will happen? If I do X, what won’t happen? If I don’t do X, what will happen? If I don’t do X, what will happen?