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In my understanding, all states have content, so there is really no such thing as a “content-free high performance state” (p. 239) any more than there is a such a thing as “pure awareness.” Awareness is always awareness of something, so it always has some content, and so does a state. A “content-free high performance state” is simply a resource state in which the content is so different from the problem state as to seem irrelevant, as in the “alphabet game.” (pp. 242-245).
This process presupposes that a high performance state will be effective for any kind of problem, skill, response, behavior, or context, and I think that this “one-size-fits-all” assumption is patently false. A high performance state for watchmaking is quite different than one for football. The resource for resolving a phobia, dissociation, is exactly the opposite of the resource for resolving grief, association.
In most fields, development of methodology results in further differentiation of more specific methods for specific applications. At one point in the development of medicine, blood-letting was considered a cure for all sorts of ailments; now it is used only in very restricted cases in which someone has too many red blood cells.
In the modeling that Connirae and I have done, we have determined the characteristics of specific difficulties and/or skills, and then characterized the resource states that are appropriate for them (just as Bandler and Grinder did for spelling). Primarily these have been content-free submodality interventions, but some include specific content shifts. For instance, in grief people often recall the unpleasant ending of the relationship through death or other loss, rather than the valuable relationship that was lost. When this is the case, it is vitally important to ask the client to change the content of their representation; resolution of grief is impossible without this content shift.
Prior to NLP, most change work was focused on content. One of NLP’s earliest and greatest contributions was to refocus attention on process (while presupposing content). However, content interventions are also useful; what is important is to distinguish between content and process, and determine which is appropriate to change in a given situation.
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