What you are describing is well known in Neuro Linguistic Programming.

True, but I don't believe it really has a name there. Tony Robbins refers to them as "references" or "reference experiences", but I'm not sure if that's his own coinage or borrowed from NLP.

I THINK this is referred to as "chunking". "Submodalities" and "anchoring" might also be relevant.

If you must throw it into a formal NLP term, the blanket term "strategy" is probably what you're looking for. (The terms you just gave are for things used in strategies, or to modify strategies.)

However, I personally think that this is one area where importing NLP terminology actually obscures more than it makes clear -- Robbins' terminology and the one used here are sufficiently clear to get the point across with a minimum number of entities introduced.

I think LW could do very well to import a lot of knowledge from NLP and try to see what's valid and what's not. I've noticed that people here are often reinventing the wheel.

Except when the wheel is, you know, 'bad'. Lesswrong wouldn't accept NLP for normative reasons. That said, I would be reluctant to give NLP 'wheel' status in any case. "Reinvent the swiss army knife" perhaps. :)