Perceptual Positions Exercise: How to Run It

A perceptual positions exercise is a structured walk through three viewpoints on the same stuck situation: your own (first position), the other person’s (second position), and a neutral observer’s (third position). You physically move between three places in the room, answer a short set of questions in each, and return to your own seat with information you did not have before. It takes about twenty minutes and works best on a conversation that keeps replaying in your head.

Position	Whose eyes	The question it answers
First	Yours	What do I actually want here, and what am I feeling?
Second	The other person’s	What does this look like from inside their situation?
Third	A neutral observer’s	What is happening between these two people?
Back to first	Yours, updated	Given all of that, what is my next move?

What is the exercise actually for?

It is for situations where you have already thought about something many times and got nowhere. Repeated thinking tends to happen from one viewpoint, which is why it loops: the same position produces the same conclusions. Moving your body to a different spot and answering questions as someone else breaks that loop mechanically.

The model behind it goes back to Gregory Bateson’s idea of double description, that depth comes from more than one view of the same thing, and was developed into triple description by John Grinder and Judith DeLozier in Turtles All the Way Down (1987). Robert Dilts later added a fourth, systemic position. Our reference entry on the three perceptual positions and what each one contributes covers the theory; this article is the drill.

One thing it is not: agreeing with the other person. Second position is an information-gathering move, not a concession. Some of the most useful runs end with you holding your ground more clearly than before, because you finally understand what you are up against.

How do you run the exercise step by step?

Set out three chairs, or three marked spots on the floor, before you start. The physical movement is not decoration; it is what stops the positions blurring into each other.

1. Choose the situation. One specific conversation with one specific person. Not “my relationship with my brother” but the argument last Tuesday.
2. Sit in position one and describe it. Through your own eyes, in the present tense. What you see, what you hear them say, what you feel and where you feel it. What you want.
3. Stand up and shake it off. Walk a few steps, look out of the window, count backwards from five. This break matters more than people expect, because you are about to take on a different state and you cannot do that carrying the last one.
4. Sit in position two as them. Take their posture. Use “I” as them. What are they seeing when they look across at you? What pressure are they under that you are not part of? What do they want out of this, and what are they afraid of?
5. Break again, properly. Same shake-off. Do not go straight from their chair to the observer chair.
6. Sit in position three as a neutral observer. Watch both of them from outside. Describe what you see in the third person: “she keeps repeating the same point, he stops making eye contact.” What is the pattern between them? What advice would you give each of them?
7. Return to position one. Bring the observer’s advice and what you learned in second position with you. Then answer one question: what is the smallest different thing I could do next time?

The exercise has worked if your answer at step seven is concrete enough to be done in a real conversation. “Be more open” is not an answer. “Ask what they actually need before I explain my side again” is.

What do you ask in each position?

Use a fixed set of questions rather than improvising, especially the first few times. These are the ones that do the most work:

• First position. What exactly do I want here? What am I feeling, and where in my body? What am I assuming about them that I have never checked?
• Second position. What is my day like, as this person? What am I not being told? What would make me feel respected in this conversation? What does the other one look like from here?
• Third position. What is the loop these two are stuck in? Who moves first, and what happens next, every time? If I had thirty seconds with each of them, what would I say?
• Back in first position. What is the one sentence I would say differently? What would I stop doing entirely?

Second position is where the exercise usually earns its keep, and it is also the one people rush. Give it longer than feels necessary. The useful detail almost never arrives in the first thirty seconds, because the first thirty seconds are still your opinion of them rather than their view of the situation.

When does this exercise not work?

Three situations, and it is worth knowing them in advance rather than concluding you did it wrong.

When the positions blur. If you sit in the second chair and mostly argue with the person from your own perspective, you never left first position. The break between chairs is the fix, and so is taking their physical posture rather than just thinking about them.

When you already live in second position. Some people spend most of their lives imagining how everyone else feels and have little access to what they themselves want. For them the exercise can reinforce the habit rather than balance it. If that sounds familiar, spend most of the time in first and third position instead, and keep second brief.

When the situation is not a misunderstanding. Understanding someone’s viewpoint is useful when both people are acting in reasonable faith. In a situation involving abuse, coercion or ongoing harm, sitting in the other person’s chair and finding their reasons is not insight, it is a way of talking yourself out of a boundary. That kind of situation belongs with a qualified professional, and this exercise complements such support rather than replacing it.

How is it different from just seeing their side?

Because “seeing their side” is done from your own chair, and that is precisely what keeps it thin. Thinking about someone’s perspective while remaining in your own body produces a version of them that conveniently confirms what you already believe.

The exercise adds two things ordinary reflection does not. It uses your posture and your location in the room, which changes the state you are thinking from, and it adds a third viewpoint that belongs to neither party. That observer position is where people most often notice the loop: not who is right, but what the two of them do to each other in sequence, over and over.

It also sits close to other ways of shifting meaning. Where our entry on reframing and how the frame around an event changes it works on the interpretation, perceptual positions works on the vantage point, and the two are often used one after the other in a coaching session. If you want to run this on something live rather than on paper, it is a standard part of one-to-one NLP coaching sessions, in Lisbon or online.

What I see when people run this in a room

The moment that changes the exercise is almost always physical, and it happens in second position. Somebody sits down in the other chair still holding their own posture, then something settles, their shoulders drop or their chin comes forward, and the next sentence out of their mouth is the one they came for. When I am watching a pair practise, that shift is what I am waiting for, and if it does not arrive I send them back to the break and the posture rather than to more questions.

The other thing I have learned to insist on is the return to first position. People find something valuable in the observer chair and want to stop there, which feels wise and changes nothing. The exercise is not finished until you are back in your own seat with a specific next move, and that last step is the one that gets skipped when nobody is watching.

Carolin Mallmann, Licensed Trainer of The Society of NLP, Lisbon

Frequently asked questions about the perceptual positions exercise

Keep exploring

• The NLP communication skills this exercise sits inside, if you want the wider set rather than one drill.
• Meta Model questions you can actually use, published this week, for the questioning half of the same conversation.

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