Stephen Woolston Training and Consultancy

How I got into NLP

2012-03-04T10:40:00.005-08:00

This is a question I get asked fairly frequently, so I thought I'd deal with it here.

I got into it without realising!

Basically, I was an up-and-coming consultant and I'd been selected for a training programme called Negotiation and Influencing Skills. It was fantastic! Quite unlike the chalk-and-talk courses we often had, which discussed theories but often without anything practical to actually go and apply, this was a very practical course which immersed us in doing what good negotiators did, backed up by simple illustrations showing the structure of what we were doing.

We all came away from that course doing things differently and business communication skills became something of a forté with me. I even found myself becoming something of a go-to person for brokering agreements in deadlocked situations, such as resolving disputes between designers.

Shortly after I was selected for a follow-on programme with a different company simply called Influential Communication Skills. Though there was a slightly different take on one or two things, I recognized most of the structures and models (Meta Model, Well-Formed Outcomes, Re-framing, etc) from the earlier course, which made me think the material must come from some common stock. I asked the trainer and he told me it was NLP.

Now, by co-incidence, I'd only just recently heard of NLP. I'd been having lunch with a project manager friend of mine called Tim. He and his colleagues had just done an introductory NLP course and they were very enthusiastic about it. Tim hadn't really pitched it to me as communication skills, however. He'd pitched it more as a set of coaching and self-coaching tools for being much more resourceful at work.

As an enthusiast for great skills and ideas, I started on the books, networked with others and soon booked myself on my first official NLP Practitioner course.

Before I actually attended that training, however, I got to do another corporate programme called The Management Development Program. That was ten days of training which, again, turned out to be calling on substantial amounts of NLP!

So, I'd already done about ten days of NLP training before I'd even heard of NLP, and about twenty before I even got to do my first Practitioner course! But anyway, that's how I got started and the rest is, as they say, history.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

How to get things done today

2012-02-12T04:19:00.000-08:00

Okay, this is not the only way to get things done and different things work for different people doing different things on different days. But if you're not getting things done today, even though you know you should, try this.

You see, yesterday I had a procrastinator day myself. I knew there were things needing done, but to be honest I'd had a busy week and I really wanted to just play computer-based pool on my laptop, catch up with what my friends were doing and watch a couple of movies. In short, I wanted a day off. As the day was wrapping up, I realised I didn't want to let the whole weekend slip away without making getting some things done. So I decided to have a productive Sunday.

And here's how.

Making it easy, psychologically, to get started

The first thing I did was make a list of things I wanted to progress. When you want to get into 'doing' rather than 'thinking about doing', writing a list is a good start.

Then — and here's the key thing — I decided I was going to just do one simple thing towards each and spend no more than fifteen minutes on each. Whichever project I was working on, I didn't have to finish it, I just had to do spend fifteen minutes doing something towards it.

So, Sunday morning comes and without thinking about it, just went to the first thing on the list. No undue thinking about it, just doing. (And being 'present' with the doing, so you can feel alive while doing it too.)

Now it's mid-day and I've done something towards everything on my list. After lunch, now I'm that 'doing' frame I might even do a bit more.

In the end, I did more than fifteen minutes on some things and less on others. Some things I finished, other things I merely made a positive forward step on. Whether or not I stuck exactly to my 'fifteen minutes' plan isn't really the point. The point is that by making a psychological shift from "I have to get this big thing done" to "I'm just going to do something simple towards it", it had become something that was easy to do.

Michael Neill, in his book Supercoach, calls this the 'starting small' strategy.

Try it.

Things like tax returns early

I always get my tax return done early. It must be that I love doing tax returns, right? Wrong! I hate them.

Nevertheless, this strategy is how I get it done. On the first day, I just do something small towards it. Generally, that's to just collect my P45, bank account tax certificates, and my business results and put them in one place. That's all. Nothing more. On day two, it's just to log on to the HMRC and spend a few minutes re-familiarising myself with it. Day three might be to just fill in the first page of the return, which is easy.

And so on.

Well, although that's the plan, which makes it easy to get started, in reality, the whole job generally gets done on the second evening. Remember, you won't necessarily stick to your plan to only do a bit each day. You might actually accelerate on. This is a 'get started' strategy, and it often works.

If you were to apply to a 'get my house clean' strategy, it might be that, today, all you're going to do is sweep the kitchen floor. That's all. Now, if you've got momentum once you're going, you can do more. But you don't have to. The key thing is to make it easy, psychologically, to get started.

The naysayer's objection

Sometimes when I present this, I get an objection like this: "It'll take me two weeks to get the house clean if I do only fifteen minutes a day!"

My answer is that this is a get started strategy. You may well find you accelerate once you get started. And, by the way, if you've been procrastinating for two weeks about cleaning the house, waiting for the right day to do the whole job, you've already spent two weeks getting nowhere!

I'm now conscious I've used trivial, mundane examples like cleaning your house and getting your taxes done to illustrate the point. Maybe that's because they're familiar examples of the kinds of things we procrastinate about. However, the same principle applies to getting your new conservatory built, changing your job, putting on a huge event, organizing a wedding, developing a new product, changing your whole business process and anything else that you might be struggling to get started with.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

A journey through realism

2012-02-11T06:03:00.000-08:00

Let me share a series of short thoughts on the question of goals being realistic:

In general I think it's more important for a goal to be exciting and motivating than 'realistic'.

We can create greater things when we're excited and motivated than we can when we're 'being realistic'

Coaching people to make their goals more realistic is a bit like saying, "Aim lower, it's easier to hit".

Who says what's realistic anyway?

In defence of 'realistic', it's hard to get motivated about a goal that seems so unrealistic it's not worth trying. But that's a question of belief, and is still more about motivation than it is about realism, really.

Also in defence of 'realistic', some people find it easier achieve their goals in small steps, but that's still more about motivation than realism.

At the end of the day, my 'rules' of coaching are: introduce whatever structure helps the client (the one in front of you right now) succeed, not the ones some management rule book said you should.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

NLP is not about putting people in boxes!

2012-02-06T12:56:00.000-08:00

I want to make an important distinction for people learning NLP to help clients through coaching or therapy.

When I was first introduced to NLP, I was told you had to work out which NLP 'type' a person is and use that as a way to understand them, communicate with them and motivate them. "Ah, I see you are a visual, away-from, in-time person," and all that. You'd speak to 'visuals' using visual words; motivate 'away from' people by pushing them away from what they don't want; and so on. One might even 'help' the client, I was told, by helping them understand what type they were.

Let's be clear:

The purpose of helping people through coaching and therapy is to help them break free from whatever limiting boxes they've put themselves in, not to put them in new ones.

When I work with clients, what I care about is whatever beliefs, generalizations and behavioural patterns the client exhibits, which limits their experience. Not pushing my labels on them, like pushing square blocks into round holes.

To read more about:

How labels can be traps
How 'elicitation' can become 'installation'
Why people tend to perceive personality readings as accurate even when they're not
A more refined way to think about these NLP distinctions

Read my prior article, Four Things — Typology.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Are you following through with your New Year's resolutions?

2012-01-22T09:17:00.000-08:00

If you set yourself some New Year's resolutions, now's a good time to check if you're following through — and if not, figure out what to do.

If you're not following through, there are many possible reasons. The one I want to pick up on here is a simple one: you made too many promises to yourself.

One thing you need to remember when setting goals (or New Year's resolutions) is this: it may take an investment of time and maybe money to realise it. If your goal / resolution was to get down to a target weight, for example, did you think through what you will do to realise that goal, when you'll be doing those things, where and with whom?

If you do that now with all the things you said you'd do, maybe you'll realise that there just isn't enough hours in the day to commit to all these projects.

Now, I'm not saying "don't think big, think small" and I'm not saying "have a rigid plan". You can still think big, and I wholeheartedly agree with that famous quote attributed to Eisenshower. ("I find planning indispensible but I find plans utterly worthless.") What I'm saying is get real about the number of projects you can commit time to.

So, if you're struggling to stick to your goals and resolutions, one answer might be to: re-frame them as projects; concentrate on just a few right now, maybe even just one or two (the ones that really count most right now); and really think through the what, where, when and with whom.

As I've often said: one transformational goal is generally worth much more than a dozen 'make things slightly better' ones. And it's definitely easier to work one or two projects than a hundred.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

How you can become a more effective and influential communicator

2011-12-23T14:59:00.000-08:00

It's common for technical and managerial professionals to, at some point or another, seek to develop their professional skills in addition to their technical skills. I'm talking about communication skills, negotiation skills and developing one's personal, professional resourcefulness.

It was in 1998, as a twenty-something IT consultant, getting more involved in negotiating and presenting solutions with customers and suppliers, that I had this experience. And that's when I did a series of courses simply called titles like Negotiation and Influencing Skills and Influential Communication Skills.

I found those courses effective for two reasons. First, they were not chalk-and-talk courses, they were experiential — we learned by doing. Second, they weren't a theory of how to be more effective, they were based on modelling the real language, behaviour and strategies of highly effective people. I came out of those courses doing new things and soon went from being less-than-confident to being the go-to person for this kind of work.

I discovered these courses were teaching skills, ideas and models from NLP. I spoke to a range of professionals I knew and discovered several of them had taken and recommended NLP as a source of professional development. That's when I decided to do my first proper NLP Practitioner course.

Here's how NLP develops professional skills specifically. It teaches models for:

How people naturally delete, distort and generalize information
Building and maintaining rapport
Recovering information with precision
Exploring wants, needs and beliefs
Building states of resourcefulness in yourself and others
Using language influentially
Re-framing conflict and structure for creating choices
Setting effective outcomes
Re-training your patterns of feelings and behaviours

This is why I recommend NLP training to people looking to develop themselves as professionals just as much as I recommend it to coaches, client-centred workers and private individuals. Indeed, a great deal of modern professional development is based on ideas from NLP. Why not go straight to the mother lode?

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

A metaphor about tracking patterns

2011-12-11T14:50:00.000-08:00

One of the things we assume in NLP is that people are systematic in their behaviour, not random. We exhibit patterns — patterns which can be modelled, utilized, interrupted, etc.

Now, NLP offers a number of models to describe these patterns and I want to make a distinction between ways you can use them.

Imagine we were developing a model to track road driving patterns. One of the distinctions might be between fast lane driving and slow lane driving. If we notice that a driver tends to stay in the slow lane, the temptation is to use the distinction and label him a slow lane driver. Conversely, if he tends to go out to the fast lane as soon as he can and stay there, the temptation is to label him a fast lane driver. (Others might be labelled, "a bit of both".)

Now, here's the thing. While the label might provide a reasonably accurate and predictive model of how that driver will drive, there's this observation:

Even so-called slow lane drivers will go out to the fast lane sometimes.

Even so-called fast lane drivers will go in to the slow lane sometimes.

So, if you want to really model the driving patterns of a driver and replicate their driving technique, is it enough to simply notice which lane the driver dominantly drives in, or is it better to track their particular rules and criteria for changing lane?

That's how I think about NLP distinctions: that diagnosing a 'style' is not nearly as useful as tracking the dynamics of how people work.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

"It's okay to be okay" — the sea change that's been happening in coaching

2011-11-21T10:12:00.000-08:00

When I first took coaching training it was part of a corporate management development programme quite a few years ago. The emphasis at the time seemed to be on goals, action and motivation. The bigger the goal and the more massive the action, the better. It was very often about material acquisition and seemed predicated on the idea that however you were at the time, it couldn't be okay. Not yet. You had to get what you want in order to be that. Sometimes we heard gurus telling us how 'not okay' we were and how we should use massive pain to get us into massive action.

Then people started to realise that very paradigm was making people miserable. And I chose not to become a coach. Not to do that.

With the rise of coaches like Michael Neill, there seems to have been a sea change in coaching in recent years. Well, it was probably always there, but it's more to the fore these days. It's not that people don't have goals any more, because they do. And it's not that there is no action or motivation, because there is. What's different is this:

Still want what you want and go after it.
But don't kid yourself you need to get it before you can be happy.
And it's okay to be okay right now.

A lot of great coaches are teaching people how to be okay again. How to be happy even though you maybe don't yet have everything you'd like. How to be happy even if things don't always go great at work. How to really want and go after things, but not feel the pain of neediness while you're still working on it. How to be driven by joy rather than pain. How to get active because you're connected with your wanting, not flagellated by deadlines.

This sea change isn't new, of course, it's been developing a while. I just really think it's arrived now. And, personally, I think it's what we really need to flourish.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

New directions

2011-11-21T09:13:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone,

This post is just to share my chat-view with the ever-so-likeable English Sisters, the delightful Violeta Zuggo and Jutka Zuggo, where I talk about the directions I'm going with my coaching work.

Enjoy!

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Advice on overwhelm

2011-11-04T11:20:00.000-07:00

Some years ago, I interviewed a very busy, much put upon, very senior IT executive about how to manage overwhelm in a busy workplace.

This is what he told me.

Treat every day the same way you'd treat an exam. You have a fixed amount of time for it. You go after the questions that give you the highest marks first. If you get stuck, you go on to the next question and come back later if you have time. Use up all your time. And when time's up, you close your paper, put your pen down, get your coat, go home and forget it. And remember, the objective isn't to get 100%, it's just to pass.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Today Matthew, I will be ...

2011-11-03T21:26:00.000-07:00

I keep coming back to a phrase from Frogs Into Princes: "labels are traps". (Except I prefer to say "can be" rather than "are".)

We tend to label ourselves — with statements like, "I am a —".

I wonder. To what extent do we choose a label because of what we do, like and believe? And to what extent is what we do, like and believe fashioned by the label?

Let's say you are 'a liberal'. I don't doubt you became 'a liberal' because there were certain things that were true about you did, liked and believed. However, I also don't doubt that who you are today is influenced by you being 'a liberal'. The label itself has probably influenced the way you've grown and changed. It has probably influenced how you remember yourself, too.

I would say I am a film music fan. I chose that label because I realised I liked a lot of film music and I enjoyed talking about it and reading about the composers whose works I liked. However, as I riffle through my CD collection, I wonder how that collection might have been different if I'd never chosen the label. I wonder how the way I spend my time today might have been different. I would certainly still have those classic film scores I loved before I took the label. I'm not sure I would have all the ones I bought since having the label. Some, yes. Maybe many. But probably not all. And I might have had more CDs from other genres.

This is just a thought experiment. You don't have to do anything with it. You don't have to drop any labels or anything like that. After all, some labels may be useful. Just contemplate what would be different in a world without labels. How would your experience of life be different if there was no 'X' to be and you were just you. Just discover if there's anything you'd like to learn from that exploration.

Start off by just repeatedly completing the sentence, "I am —". Like: I am a conservative; I am a law-abiding citizen; I am an artist; I am a book collector; I am a photographer; I am a caucasian. Have some fun with it too and include some of the labels you just joke about, like: I am a lazy bastard. For each, just contemplate what would be different for you if there was no label to be had in this space and you were free to just honestly be who you'd be without the label.

Like I said, you don't have to do anything with it. It's just an exploration. It's just that you might learn some things you find interesting.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

How we hypnotise ourselves

2011-10-22T00:21:00.000-07:00

Still not sure about hypnosis? Or the everydayness of it? Let me illustrate how we engage in self hypnosis, even if we don't realise it.

Lets take a real person but reveal no names. He suffers his work. He tells himself he mustn't say no to anyone, because it would make him seem negative and he wouldn't be liked or well thought of. And that in turn would mean his job isn't safe, which means his comforts are not safe and financial disaster could be just round the corner. Amidst all this self-talk, there are a mix of visual images: Images of 'negative' people taking liberties with their employers (cue feelings of disgust, which he willingly increases), imaginary unkind conversations about what others are saying about him (cue concern), images of him being rewarded for all the strain he takes (cue good feelings) versus images of the disasters that could be round the corner if he says no (cue horror and panic).

That's a pretty powerful ritual, wouldn't you say? It's not an especially conscious process and it's easy to see how someone might feel compelled to keep saying 'yes' with that ritual spinning around in their head.

So, he keeps accepting work and his to-do list gets longer. And as he looks at the 'enormity' of what he has to do, he stands up to take a deep breath, tells himself, "I've got sooooooooo much to do", spinning lots of internal images of all the things he's got to do and what people will say if he doesn't and him struggling to work out how he'll get it all done. And as he does this his stomach tightens. He responds by imagining himself telling his friend how much 'pressure' he feels and, lo, the stomach tightens again. He invokes a familiar cultural metaphor of having 'the weight of the world on his shoulders' and people notice he even seems to walk slightly stooped, like he's carrying something heavy on his back.

Does this sound in any way familiar?

Now, here's the thing. When he says, "I've got soooooo much to do", the familiar invocation for all this 'pressure' and 'weight', I do not doubt he has really promised to do many tasks. However, how much of this mental experience is 'real'?

These self-talk suggestions, the internal images and the feelings they're linked with form a kind of self-hypnosis that's become automated.

Two things ought to be obvious:

First, there are dubious beliefs at the foundation of this whole cycle — beliefs which are relatively easy to burst. How does he know what people will say, if he says no? He doesn't! And what if he learned how to influence what they will say if he says no? Is it really true that saying no means you'll lose your job and your whole world will irrevocably cave in? What if it all hangs on a lack of skill at how to say no effectively? Could it be that people who say no aren't really slackers, but are in fact being more responsible?

Secondly, if we can make our experience hard and painful with these kinds of mind rituals and invocations, doesn't it follow we can also make it joyful and uplifting? It's not a question of tree hugging. It's not a question of denying reality. It's a question of having more helpful rituals and invocations — ones that make us feel energised, perform better and get more done.

My proposition (and the proposition of NLP) is that how we feel, perform and experience our lives and work has a lot more to do with our unconscious thinking rituals than what's real. What I love about NLP is it gives us tools and models to explore, unpick and change those rituals. (Indeed, one way you could define NLP is as the attitude and tools for exploration and change.)

Now, if you're still troubled by the ritual of the self-thrashed professional, how about remembering how damned silly it was. How about imagining how great it is to get single things done, irrespective of whether or not there are other things that have not been achieved yet. We might invoke the cultural metaphor of how you eat an elephant. (One bite at a time.) How about imagining how simple it is to get things done by simply choosing just one thing that counts right now and giving it your attention. How about imagining the freedom that comes with saying 'no' to things you can't realistically take on, especially when you realize you are already doing plenty of worthy things. How about remembering how it's ultimately best for everyone if you're honest about what you can get done and what you can't. You can even imagine yourself communicating really well about why you have to say no to this task, or alternatively agree a change in priorities. How about remembering that if something really is that important and you can't get to it, others will want to help, not hinder. Or something a bit like that.

See, there are much more empowering ways to construct your subjective experience and we can learn to make our unconscious thoughts much more productive than maybe they were.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

On success and pain

2011-10-10T15:35:00.000-07:00

A number of success gurus still posit that suffering is a necessary condition of success.

Is that true?

Listen, I'm not being fanciful here. I know success generally requires some kind of work, investment and nurturing on the part of those who wish to succeed. One might even describe it as 'hard' work if there's a lot to do or if it doesn't come easily. We may well experience difficulties and set-backs.

Whether or not we have to find those things painful is another thing. Whether or not that means we should equate success with pain, or even seek it, is yet another thing still.

Hey, what about if we equated success with joy and satisfaction instead?

I'm sure a Duncan Bannatyne, a Richard Branson or a Rachel Elnaugh would testify to long hours, financial difficulties and challenging times on their journeys of success. I'm sure they'd testify to success not being easy. I don't doubt there have been times they would describe as insufferable, too.

I don't doubt that experience.

But is that what drives them — the love of pain? I doubt it.

I don't think people succeed because they deliberately seek out the hard way. I don't think they succeed by flagellating themselves into doing things they hate doing either, though that does seem to be a popular strategy for attempting fitness and weight loss. I think people become successful because they are inspired by their dream and because they find it easy and natural to set about their works. When you're driven by inspiration, problems are something to be worked through. They're a reason to invest energy. When you're driven by flagellation, they become your reason to give up.

For this reason, I think the highest form of the coaching art is to help people use the tools of inspiration, not the tools of flagellation. I think it's to make doing the works the path of least resistance, not the path of most resistance. I think it's to make the works an inspirational thing to participate in, not a painful thing.

So what about the observation that people can experience hardship on their way? Well, remember this: we are always an active role player in what we experience. If we experience something as hard, we were involved in creating that. If we are suffering, we are involved in creating that too. It's not that set-backs don't happen, it's that we can play an active role in how we experience them.

In short, I believe the better conditions of success are the inspiration of the dream, the joy of participation and the satisfaction of what we get done. Not the supposed necessity of pain.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

The pros and cons of being SMART

2011-09-21T17:20:00.000-07:00

Everyone’s familiar with the SMART model of goal setting, right — specific, measurable, etc?

You should be. If you're in corporate training, coaching or consultancy, it's just the right answer. To anything. Say anything else and you may be asked to leave the club, it's that ubiquitous. (Now, what was the question?) Hell, some coaches would insist your whole damn life is supposed to be SMART. And then there are others who think SMART is the work of Satan.

There's a lot to be said for SMART when its used for the right reasons. It’s especially useful when your goals are in some way 'contractual' between you and someone else — as corporate goals often are. If my bonus depended on achieving the goals I agree with my manager, would I want them to be specific, measurable, realistic, etc? You bet I would!

When it comes to personal life goals, SMART can still be useful but it can also have downsides.

"You can't have that goal — it's not SMART!"

I once watched a someone coach a client till the goal that did make their eyes light up had become totally dreary — but SMART. It wasn't a happy sight. He thought it was good coaching because he'd made the goal SMART. Personally, I can't call any work of coaching good if it takes a client who was inspired and sends them away not wanting their goals any more.

One potential problem area is with this edict to make your goals 'realistic'. Well, some people can bite off too much and get stuck and frustrated that way. That's one thing the 'realistic' bit would seem to combat. It's fine if that's the coaching problem. On the other hand, this condition has a tendency to demote your goals from 'what you really want' to 'what you think you can have', potentially shifting them from inspirational to 'blah'.

Besides — realistic according to whose limited beliefs?

What would you say to a kid who dreams of being captain of the England football team — have you ever considered a career as an insurance clerk, son?

It's said the measure of your life's goals isn't so much whether you achieved them as whether they made you come alive, get inspired, get motivated, get creative and do great things. To this end, some coaches promulgate that your life's big goals should be uncompromisingly unrealistic — as long as it does that 'inspiring' thing and there's ecology built in at all levels.

(Traditionally conservative corporate coaches will be gasping at this heresy.)

The trouble with deadlines

It's often said, "A goal without a deadline is just a dream." (Though I'm not sure when having a dream became such a bad thing.)

A deadline often focuses the mind, which is the intended effect. Some writers really come alive when the deadline looms. There’s no time for analysis paralysis, you just gotta get copy out.

Thing is, for a deadline to work, there has to be something real about it. Not getting the newspaper to press in time is real. Not being ready for your exams is real. Not reaching your financial goals by July next year is not. I mean, what’s really going to happen if you haven't reached your financial goals by July? Nothing! You could make the deadline more real by telling yourself you’ll be a worthless turd if you fail, and follow through with that. Y’know, give yourself something painful to move away from. If that brings you joy and gets you achieving your goals, fair play to you. But what if it doesn’t bring you joy? What if it doesn’t get you achieving your goals? What if it’s left you kicking yourself?

You could do something a bit more wholesome: you could make it a game to meet the deadline — make it a worthy challenge. You could pump yourself up on how great it would be to achieve it by that date, however you’re still faced with the issue that there’s still nothing real about that deadline. As July creeps up on you, there’s still nothing real to get a rise out of you. It’s still too easy to just push the date out another month.

That's the trouble with fake deadlines.

Having a deadline has become one of the rules of goal setting and it seems predicated on the (false) notion that everyone needs a deadline to get motivated. Actually, not everyone does. If you really want something, you don’t need a deadline to get you off your bottom. And deadlines don’t always work. Believe it or not, some people are actually turned off by deadlines, not turned on. Some people shrink under them, rather than grow. Some people die off, rather than come alive. And we need to come alive in the pursuit of goals. I know some people who got active on their goals just because they were following their inspiration.

Perhaps it's not deadlines we need but more inspirational goals.

Some of the greatest goals in history weren't SMART

Was Kennedy's 1961 dream of putting a man on the moon by 1969 realistic? Well, in hindsight, evidently it was. But would you have thought that at the time? (This is one example where a date fixation helped.)

Was Churchill’s goal of defeating Germany in World War II specific, measurable, realistic and time based? It was probably none of the above — but still worth going after.

What would you have said if Martin Luther King had come to you in 1960 for coaching in the goal of a racially integrated America?

Should we turn people away from a lifetime's campaign to cure cancer because the goal isn't SMART? A motivated, creative, inspired, compassionate life forged in the reach towards a world without cancer may result not only in great things but also personal fulfilment — even if the end goal is not achieved in one's life time.

When do you use a tool? When it's the one that works!

Lest you think this is an attack on deadlines and the SMART model, it absolutely isn't. Deadlines are one of the motivational tools we have available to us, and it can be a really good one. I just disagree that it's always the right way to motivate. SMART is an excellent antidote to certain problems. However, used indiscriminately it also creates them.

Some goals are best off being free of 'the rules' — and left to be just what we really want them to be.

I'll tell you one context where deadlines are a great idea — when you're so inspired that unless you set yourself a strict stop time, you'll just keep going indefinitely. (That's not using a deadline as a motivational tool so much as a 'stop yourself going on endlessly' tool.)

My personal recommendation

As I mentioned above, I think SMART is most at home as a model for goals which are in some way contractual between you and another party. It makes sure you're both on the same page, ensures the ask is fair and sets up agreed measures to avoid arguments later.

I think it can also be good for what you might call 'incremental', step-wise goals within the big dream. It depends on the person and the goal.

SMART is not a good model for the big dream itself.

Lastly ... SMART is not the same as well-formed outcomes

It surprises me how many people think the S, the M, the A, the R and the T represent the five well-formedness conditions for outcomes in NLP. Gee, talk about getting things mixed up.

Remember, the classic NLP well-formed outcome conditions are:

1. Stated in the positive
2. Initiated and maintained by the individual
3. Contextualised for ecology
4. Preserves the positive by-products on the present state
5. Testable (some say 'specified') in sensory experience

SMART is for representing a goal on paper. It's specified in data — digital.

The well-formed outcomes is a model for framing and representing a goal such that it can be installed into one's unconscious as a star to steer by. That's why it's specified in sensory experience rather than data.

Notice there's no 'deadline' condition for well-formed outcomes, though I find it is often useful to put some sense of time in to the sensory map.

So, there you have it — a contemplation on goals and SMART-ness!

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Attribution Errors

2011-09-21T00:55:00.001-07:00

I was in a car the other day, as a passenger. Someone overtook us, going faster than the speed limit. "Arsehole," he muttered.

Later, after a few traffic delays, he put his foot down and overtook a line of cars, doing 80mph. I asked him why. He said, "If I don't, we're going to be late."

In Psychology, there's an effect called Attribution Error. It's the tendency of people to attribute their own behaviour (or results) to their conditions (or excuses) but attribute other people's behaviour to their personality.

For example:

"When I speed, it's because I'm late for an important event. When the other guy speeds, it's because he's a bad driver."

"When I shout, it's because I've been wronged. When the other guy shouts, it's because he's short tempered."

"When I'm late, it's because everything went wrong this morning. When the other guy is late, it's because he's a bad planner."

"When I park in a no-parking zone, it's because I have really important business, I can't find anywhere else, I'm short of time and it'll only take a few minutes anyway. When the other guy parks in the no-parking zone, it's because he's inconsiderate."

As a thought experiment, today, just contemplate where you might be making attribution errors in your life and relationships. Contemplate where you might perform behaviours you'd complain about in others. Contemplate how it would be if the other person's behaviour might actually be due to their conditions, instead of their personality.

It can be an interesting and informative experiment.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

An onion model for skill acquisition

2011-09-16T06:11:00.000-07:00

This is just a thought experiment.

Imagine if skill acquisition was like an onion.

On the outside, what we see is the results people get — results we might want to replicate, such as excellent sales and consistently good coaching; and results people might be asking us to help them change, like consistently fluffing their public speeches or getting debilitating anxiety about Mondays.

When you peel that layer away, what you find underneath is that there are behaviours producing those results. Very often, they cannot be adequately expressed in conscious, linear, stepwise instructions — and that often fools people into thinking the skill is not teachable. (It's like you either have it or you don't. You might as well say, "it's magic".) And because these skills and behaviours are in the domain of unconscious competence, the performer might not even be conscious that they do them.

That may seem like a problem, however when you peel away to the next layer, you find there are patterns to this behaviour — a structure to that magic: reliable stimulus-response patterns, repeating language patterns, physiological patterns and strategies. The proposition of NLP style modelling is that by experimenting with these patterns experientally (not academically) and getting real-world see-hear-feel feedback (as opposed to imaginary feedback), one can inductively and iteratively build the same system of unconsciously competent behaviours as the role model — and thereby get the kinds of results they do.

It doesn't end there. When you peel away to the next layer, you find prerequisites: attributes required to perform the patterns. What's prerequisite to using language patterns, for example, is having language, rhythm and tonal skills. It is a trap to ignore prerequisites. Successful modelling isn't just about replicating patterns. You can replicate the patterns of Roger Federer's tennis play all you want — if you don't have the particular musculature, stamina, hand-eye coordination and fundamental motor skills that are prerequisite to the patterns of his play, you won't get great results. Some times you have to go back and develop prerequisites first. Or at least stretch them.

Thought experiment over. I'll let you decide for yourself whether that was a useful trip or not, to get 'something' about the idea of modelling.

Let's put this back into the context of learning NLP itself.

1. Decide what's on the outer layer of the onion for you — what kind of results do you want to be getting with your new skills? Is it to be an excellent modeller? Is it to get better sales results? Is it to be a great coach? This will help you order and purpose your learning. (Aimless learning can be inefficient.)

2. Build and stretch the pre-requisites of doing NLP — the sensory acuity skills, the ability to really see and hear language (remember, language isn't all verbal), the ability to use your communicative faculties, the ability to be sensitive to feedback from multiple perceptual positions, etc.

3. Learn and experiment with the patterns of excellence offered in NLP. Not learning about the patterns — learning the patterns. That means learning by doing. Learning by immersion, even.

4. From that, put the patterns to use in the context of the results you want to create and, from the feedback, induce the unconscious competencies that will support you.

Not that these form totally distinct stages. This is an overly simplified model. You don't necessarily finish developing prerequisites before you start working with patterns, for instance. There are overlaps. At different times, you could be working multiple layers at once.

The only thing I would add is this:

While NLP itself can help you become a better modeller, sales person, manager, coach, etc — perhaps because these are all areas in which you can apply the skills, ideas and models of NLP — let's not forget the fundamental proposition of NLP is to become a modeller. Go and apply NLP to further modelling in the pursuit of what you want to be good at.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Postscript — on layers and levels

I was careful to not use the word 'levels' with this analogy. Do not confuse this with any concept of logical levels. It's simply an analogy — of peeling away at layers of peoples' excellence. I'm not saying it's right and true. It's not a map of reality. It's just one analogy that might help people get something about the idea of modelling and my approach to teaching NLP.

This deliberate intention set me thinking. Robert Dilts came up with an idea of neuro-logical levels, in which he proposed the following levels:

1. Spiritual / connectedness / purpose
2. Identity
3. Values and beliefs
4. Capabilities
5. Behaviours
6. Environment

This model was criticised for many reasons, not least of which is that they are not logical levels. This article (click here) by Andy Bradbury deals with the key objections. I agree this is not a system of logical levels. I do find the distinctions useful, however. I can see the usefulness of aligning someone's sense of identify with what they want to contribute to the world, for example. I can see the usefulness of aligning one's values and beliefs with what they want to be, do and have. I wonder. What if we thought of these entities as layers of congruence, perhaps? Or, perhaps not even layers. Perhaps simply ingredients in the mix.

That was just a little side thought from my care to not imply logical levels in this analogy.

Why you can't teach yourself NLP

2011-09-03T16:06:00.000-07:00

(By just reading books, that is.)

Well, it's not so much that you can't — I don't like the word "can't". I'm not sure it's a good way to get good results, though.

It seems tired and well-worn to evoke the old "it's like driving" metaphor. Yet, it's still one of the best metaphors to get the point across. You see, the end-game of learning NLP is not to be able to recapitulate book knowledge — to demonstrate your encyclopaedic ability to list pillars and presuppositions and patterns. It's not even to 'understand' what the book says, particularly. The end-game is to be able to do things — and do them exquisitely.

Imagine if you tried to learn to drive a car by reading a book. You might know in principle what you're supposed to do, but that kind of training builds no tacit knowledge of how hard or soft to push the pedals to get different acceleration and braking effects. It trains no sensory acuity for the different sounds of the engine. It doesn't automate the necessary motor skills such as the gear change. And it doesn't really teach you how to really see, hear, feel and respond to what's going on in the road.

Those things have to be experientially learned.

In fact, book knowledge about the car controls doesn't really help at all. It's training the motor skills, the seeing and hearing skills, the various trigger-response patterns and the various analogue distinctions so you can sense things like 'too close', 'too fast', 'too slow', 'I need more gas' and 'yes, there is enough room to pull out now' that makes the driving skill.

Similarly, when you've been brought in to negotiate a multi-million dollar commercial dispute, or help a client overcome life-ling, heels-dug-in limiting beliefs, book knowledge isn't what's going to be useful. What's going to be useful is the behavioural integration of those ideas. It's having the skills and sensory awareness to see, hear, feel and respond to what's going on that counts.

Like driving, using NLP is about skills not information. For these reasons, seek an instructor who can help you develop the necessary skills.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Postscript

After some comments, I want to add a few things.

First of all, I'm referring to learning NLP with the intention of professing in NLP or doing client centred work, not reading an NLP book to get some self help tips. Of course you can read a book and learn to push bad memories into the distance — or to be guided through a personal 'swish' pattern to help yourself quit your bad habit.

The key point here is that tacit knowledge doesn't come from reading a book. It can come from personal practice, experimentation and modelling as well as instruction. However, what's hit-and-miss about 'pure' self instruction — where there is no model, mentor or even co-learner to check and reference by — is you don't necessarily know what you may have missed or got wrong. I used to teach martial arts and once worked with a guy who had taught himself the basic forms from a book. Sadly, when he demonstrated them, there were a lot of performance errors and he just didn't know. Either there were points in the book he'd missed, or points the book couldn't adequately express.

This is why, to profess in NLP, you need to go beyond reading books to experiential learning and have a model or mentor to check and reference with.

It's also been pointed out that skill comes more from ongoing practice than initial instruction. In the driving metaphor, it's acquired from the act of driving, it's not 'given' by the instructor. That's also very true. What the instructor can do however, which a book can't, is give feedback.

Don't get me wrong — books are great, but just studying books won't instil the tacit knowledge or check that you're developing things correctly.

Four things: the whole series

2011-09-03T09:07:00.000-07:00

Whilst not all my work is about NLP, I am passionate about good NLP and, recently, since I've been preparing my next NLP Practitioner programme, I created a series of four articles I called Four Things. The articles deal with various common errors people could make in building their conceptions of NLP.

The purpose of this blog post is simply to act as an one stop shop for people to find those other articles. (It means I can point people to just this link!)

They are:

Enjoy!

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Four things: Fixedness, Closure and Just-so-ism

2011-08-22T15:16:00.000-07:00

'Four things' is a series of meditations I created to promote better understanding and utilisation of NLP. It's aimed at intermediate and advanced readers of NLP and compiles, consolidates and supersedes a scattering of points I've made in over the years in previous posts. (Those posts are now gone.) Some of them dealt with common errors made in some pop-NLP books. Others looked at aspects of common NLP lore which are apt for revision, or are at odds with what leading thinkers really think. Either way, it's based on my experiences and things I learned when I was being mentored by some of the top trainers in NLP. Familiarity with basic NLP ideas and terms is assumed.

The fourth thing: Fixedness, Closure and Just-so-ism

Let's say you were a curious but as-yet uninformed NLP newbie. Let's say you went into Waterstones (that's a UK book store chain, in case you don't know), picked up all the books on the shelf with NLP in the title and riffled through the pages. You might come to this conclusion:

That NLP is this fixed, closed, just-so field — typified by a fixed syllabus, specific inventories and definite right and wrong answers to questions.

After all, the content of many books suggests a canonical syllabus in which the information is organized into an orderly, logical structure of sections, sub-sections and bullet pointed lists. They're often much like the college textbooks I studied for Mathematics, Physics and Computer Science.

(That's not a criticism by the way, just an observation.)

I always got the impression the originators of NLP never intended their work to be so formal or academic. I always got the impression their idea was like Bruce Lee's idea for his martial art Jeet Kune Do — to have lots of ideas and training methods but be typified by skills and flexibility, not fixed forms, rules and inventories.

NLP isn't fixed and closed

One of the first surpises I had when I first explored NLP was to discover that there isn't, in fact, a single, universally agreed upon inventory of what makes up NLP. Robert Dilts, for example, puts great stock in his model of Neuro-Logical Levels. Wyatt Woodsmall, however, wrote an article pointing out how there's nothing logical or levelled about them. John Grinder explicitly claims the model has no place in NLP and Richard Bandler just doesn't mention them. John Grinder has his New Code stuff and other people don't. Richard Bandler has spinning feelings and teaches nested loops as a tool in 'installing' NLP where others teach traditional presentation skills for trainers. Oh, and outcomes have either four, five or nine 'well-formedness' conditions depending on who you're talking to.

Hey, it's not a problem. All it means is there's a rich, vibrant, living pool of ideas out there and different trainers have different ideas about what to teach.

Remember, NLP isn't a 'fixed form' art.

What you've read isn't 'right' as such — and it isn't 'just-so'

In Physics, it is 'right' that F=MA. In Mathematics, it is 'right' that the angles inside a triangle add up to one hundred and eighty degrees. With NLP, we're not actually dealing with the study of what's right and true. We're dealing with patterns, models, ideas, constructs and analogies that prove useful in communication, change and personal resourcefulness. When you're dealing with patterns, models, ideas, constructs and analogies, it's not so much a question of being right as being useful. I mean, do you really think there's only ever one model and analogy that is right when you're trying to describe something?

Take the Meta Model. Originally, it was a model of how therapists use language. It took what they demonstrated in practice and sifted it into a number of patterns that people can learn. Now, is there one exclusively right way to label and group that set of patterns? I'd say not. There are probably a dozen valid ways you could have labelled and grouped things. (Indeed, if you check your NLP books going right back to The Structure Of Magic, you'll find the labels and groupings have changed several times over the years.) One might argue that one particular system of labels and groupings works better than another, but it's a bit religious to defend one way as absolutely right and all the others as absolutely wrong.

Same with Meta Programs. They're not 'real' as such and, again, it's possible to come up with different ways of labelling and grouping.

In short, don't let the lists and inventories in the books kid you into thinking everything in NLP is 'right' and 'just-so'.

Remember, NLP isn't a 'fixed form' art.

Don't take everything literally

One of the easiest thinking traps in NLP is to read the models and analogies and take them literally. I once heard an expert in communication skills tell a rapt crowd that deletion, distortion and generalization are literally what we do. Like: it's not a model; it's not an analogy; it's not a map — it is literally what the brain does. This is what I would call the classic map / territory distinction error.

I've discussed this one before and I won't repeat it here. For more on this, click on this previous post: Is it deletion we do, again?

In that, I point out the idea of surface structure, deep structure and transformations between the two was tendered by Chomsky as a model for accounting for the difference between an utterance and what it represents. It was not tendered as a description of the literal mental process for generating sentences. Yet some people took it as that way.

That surface structure / deep structure model does help people build good intuitions about language and what to do to transform the thinking of the speaker. In that sense it proves a useful model. It's not a claim to the literal processes of the brain though.

Be mindful of the difference.

The evolution and flow of ideas wasn't meant to stop

Early NLP was rife with creativity. When did we decide there'd been enough ideas? When did we decide it was time to shut the gates and mummify what had been gathered? Never! In a way, it's sad that NLP still tenders out-dated ideas from Transformational Grammar as if they're still current. I believe the spirit of NLP is not to stop exploring and settle for a list of fixed ideas. I believe it's to take the key principles and keep exploring, keep absorbing ideas and keep trying different things.

Keep your mind open.

And remember, NLP isn't a 'fixed form' art.

In a nutshell ...

As you look at the books, don't let the inventories of frames, patterns, meta programs, etc, fool you into thinking NLP is a 'fixed form' art which is closed and just-so. It's actually a wide-open field. I believe the invitation of NLP is to take ideas that have proven useful in practice and go explore what you can do with them. Do that. I believe the invitation is to become a modeller and furnish your own success. Do that. I don't believe the invitation is to become slaves to the text book. Don't do that.

Celebrate that NLP is open. Learn the ideas. Explore. Flourish.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Four things: Techniquing

2011-08-11T16:29:00.000-07:00

Four things: Rules and Mantras

2011-07-30T13:33:00.000-07:00

The map is not the territory
There is no failure, only feedback
All behaviour is motivated by some positive intention
The meaning of communication is the response you get

... and so on.

Let me ask you a question. Are they true?

These statements are sometimes posited as the belief system of NLP — as things we accept as true without proof. That's dubious. I prefer to think about them as simply being part of the model of NLP rather than a belief system. For one thing, it's trivial to demonstrate they are not all true. At least, not always. Is there really no such thing as failure? Well, if I set out to fly a bunch of dignitaries from London to New York but crash the plane in the sea killing all on board, that's a failure. So why do we say it? Because in the pursuit of outcomes it's almost never useful to frame a setback as a failure. And if the meaning of communication is the response you get, a red traffic light means go if I drive through it, right? Wrong! So why do we say it? Because it is generally useful to take responsibility for being understood by checking the responses you're getting.

These statements are there to suggest an attitude and methodology. They're not necessarily claims to truth.

Words are not 7% of communication, okay?

If I see one more book telling me words are 7% of communication, I'll cry. Well, I won't, but you get it that I've seen this too often. It's just common misinformation and indicative of the willingness people have to swallow information and regurgitate it as proof of their expertise but not think or check it out.

Think about it. If words were really only 7% of communication, and 93% of communication was achieved without words, you ought to be able to go to Russia as a non-speaker of Russian, and be able to pretty much understand a non-speaker of English, right?

For the record, the 7%-38%-55% conclusion is about how we resolve inconsistent communication and only applies to communication of feelings and attitudes. It does not apply to general communication.

Some mottoes are just parroted misinformation which belong in the bin.

(Note: that particular motto never came from the field of NLP in the first place. It just finds its way into lots of NLP books.)

Don't give me all your money now

Before you open your cheque book (because NLP lore says you were just about to do so), let's deal with the subject of brains not processing negatives.

Before I was a fully licensed trainer, I was assisting on someone else's NLP Practitioner course. It was the Christmas season and the UK's Don't Drink And Drive Campaign was out. Oh, how everyone guffawed. "Don't they realise they're actually programming people to drink and drive?" asked they. I asked who had seen the adverts. Of course, they all had. Then I asked which of them had obeyed the command and partaken in a bout of drink-driving. None of them had. Funny, that. What they were applying was the mantra that if you tell someone to not do something, they will (always) do it.

If I say to you, "don't think of a pink elephant," chances are you'll think of a pink elephant. However, that's a comment on thinking (or, perhaps more precisely, processing), not doing. If I tell you to not twitch your finger, it wouldn't surprise me if you did. However, that's a comment on ideomotor response, not doing per se. If I take a master tight rope walker and coach him to not think about falling off, I wouldn't be surprised if he fell off. However, that's a comment on how our thoughts affect our state and physiology, not doing per se.

There is something real and observable in the subject of negation in trance and language but things aren't as absolute as some mantras suggest. Our state, physiology, mental direction and behavioural direction are influenced by our thoughts and that's one reason why it's worth focusing on what we do want rather than on what we don't. That lesson can be especially useful with children, whose curiosity is rapt by whatever you tell them to do and not do. Whether that means a headline like Don't Drink And Drive really turns people at large into involuntary drink drivers is a different question. There are a number of factors that could influence it: the level of trance in which the command was delivered; the delivery itself; how much 'uptime' there is between the suggestion and the act; how much consciousness is involved in the act; how easily the person can construct and choose from a set of alternatives (bus, taxi, walk, lift, etc); whether the thought of drink-driving is anchored to a 'towards' or 'away from' response; and, perhaps most importantly, what other 'self-check' programs might kick in to stop you doing something stupid.

If the thought of drink-driving is anchored to a massive 'away from' response, which is what the UK campaign was out to achieve (the adverts were quite shocking and violent), installing and firing that anchor through the Don't Drink And Drive slogan might work very well indeed. It could actually be argued that it is elegant NLP, not bad NLP. It could be said it was building a powerful 'self-check' program in the viewers.

There are important lessons about negation in language, but dig deeper than the very basic generalisations. The idea that everybody will always do what you tell them to not do is a little too general.

The banned words of NLP

I was once told there are three banned words in NLP — why, but and try.

Whilst teaching people new communication habits, we might temporarily and artificially ban the 'why' question. Why? (Sorry, couldn't resist.) Two reasons, really. First, NLP is more about the structure of how people work, not the stories they tell themselves about why. Second, asking people why can be an invitation to justify their problems rather than explore them. One shouldn't confuse that with 'why' being a bad or banned word. It's just a question of understanding its effect and using the words that give us the effects we want. Indeed, when eliciting Meta Programs, 'why' might be the very question you want.

In my pre-Practitioner introduction to NLP, I was certainly taught that we should never say 'but'. We should always (yes, always) replace 'but' with 'and'. That's another example of taking something NLP did say and turning it into something NLP did not say. See, the thing about 'but' is that it tends to negate what came before it. Sometimes, that's what you want.

Lastly, there's 'try'. If you try, you fail. End of. Sorry, but there are times I tried and succeeded anyway. Once again, it's not that the word is bad, it's that it has an effect. When you say, "I'll try," it doesn't mean you will fail, it just means you've set it up so it's okay to fail.

There are no bad or banned words — just cause to be aware of the effects of words.

In a nutshell ...

NLP is rife with mottoes and sound bites. There is at least one really bad one ("words are only 7% of communication") and it isn't even anything to do with NLP anyway — but you'll see it in lots of NLP books. Some of the sound bites are genuine NLP but you just need to understand that they are pointers rather than factual claims. Some are pointers to a suggested attitude and methodology.

For the sake of doing better NLP: become aware of the bad mottoes and dump them; be well aware of the distinction between a motto about attitude and a claim about truth; and be curious and inquisitive enough to dig beneath the surface of some of the generalised mottoes quoted in the name of NLP. Things are often not really as black-and-white as some mantras suggest.

Most of all, don't become a 'scripture quoter' practitioner. They can be bloody annoying!

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Postscript

Above, I referred to: The so-called 'Presuppositions of NLP'.

Why choose that turn of phrase? Simply because it's debatable whether that's really a good name for them. The linguistics definition of a presupposition is an implicit assumption or background belief relating to an utterance. It is a property of utterances, not of knowledge or methods. Strictly speaking, the only linguistic presuppositions of the utterance Neuro-Linguistic Programming are that there is neurology, there is linguistics and there is programming.

Also, one implication of something being a presupposition is that it is prior and necessary to the thing that presupposes it. It's difficult to call these generalisations 'prior and necessary' to NLP given at least some of them were designated after NLP was up and running as a field and that it is possible to demonstrate good NLP without having to strictly suppose everything in that list.

The counter-argument is there's a definition which is not from linguistics, found in dictionaries: to suppose in advance of something. I think it is fair to say the NLP proposition is to suppose these ideas in advance of performing your work — to suppose, for example, that there is no failure only feedback. Taken in that sense, one might argue for the appropriateness of the word.

It's not necessarily a point to get overly hung up about, it's just that given NLP's proximity with linguistics, there is an argument for disambiguation by calling them something like 'The Operational Principles of NLP' instead.

(Credit to NLP Master Trainer Eric Robbie, who introduced me to this debate.)

Four things: Typology

2011-07-26T15:56:00.000-07:00

'Four things' is a series of meditations I created to promote better understanding and utilisation of NLP. It's aimed at intermediate and advanced readers of NLP and compiles, consolidates and supersedes a scattering of points I've made in over the years in previous posts. (Those posts are now gone.) Some of them dealt with common errors made in some pop-NLP books. Others looked at aspects of common NLP lore which are apt for revision, or are at odds with what leading thinkers really think. Either way, it's based on my experiences and things I learned when I was being mentored by some of the top trainers in NLP. Familiarity with basic NLP ideas and terms is assumed.

The first thing: NLP and Typology

I think one of the most common misconceptions about NLP is that it represents a system of personality types, where the idea is identify which NLP type someone is and use that as a way of understanding how to communicate with them.

Representation systems as types

In my early pre-Practitioner introduction to NLP, I was told to listen to the words people used and decide which type they were — visual, auditory or kinaesthetic. It didn't seem right at the time and as it turns out, I was correct. It is a canard. The first time I saw Richard Bandler, one of the first things he did was to mock that misconception. It's still out there, though. Only recently someone came out to one of my courses, having done some corporate derived-from-NLP course, and said to me, "I'm auditory, what are you?"

Good NLP certainly talks about tracking and matching people's use of V-A-K language — as a way of building rapport, discerning their strategies, optimising the way you package information, etc. It also talks about people potentially exhibiting preferences in the way they use their V-A-K resources. However, what good NLP also teaches is that peoples' use of their V-A-K resources is dynamic, not static. Even when a preferred representation system seems to be being exhibited, it doesn't necessarily mean it'll be preferred for all tasks and it doesn't even mean it's the only one in use for the task at hand.

It's tracking the dynamics of people's V-A-K language that's the refined understanding, not applying static labels.

Meta Programs as personality types

I've never been a big fan of using Meta Programs as a Myers-Briggs type of personality profile, though I accept it's commonly done and probably works reasonably well much of the time.

A woman once insisted to me that she was an 'away from' person. I asked her how she knew. She told me it was because she'd done a Meta Programs questionnaire asking what typically made her change her job and car. She gave answers which divined her as being 'away from'.

I asked, "So what would you have been if the question had been 'What made you open your Christmas presents on Christmas morning?'"

You see, it's not that someone is a 'towards' or 'away from' person, it's that you can track patterns of towards-ness and 'away from'-ness in their behaviour and predict when each will arise.

In fairness, all the books I've read on Meta Programs based profiling acknowledge that people's Meta Programs can shift with context. Personally, I think even that misses how fluidly Meta Programs can shift. It's trivial to demonstrate they can also shift dynamically within context. This could happen as people's thoughts move in different directions; or as different values and beliefs become opportune or threatened. Indeed, as NLP Master Trainer Gabriel Guerrero told me, people can shift to opposite ends of a Meta Program inside a single strategy. (Gabe was, for many years, one of Richard Bandler's co-trainers.)

For these reasons I prefer what a number of leading NLP thinkers are saying today: as with representation systems, track the dynamics rather than assign a label; and track what the person demonstrates unconsciously rather than how they answer questionnaires. That's because ...

Questionnaires can be unreliable

What people do unconsciously may be different to what they answer on a questionnaire, even if they think they're answering honestly. Someone I knew once profiled herself as a 'towards' type. Her exact words were, "I'm a 'towards' person because what motivates me is getting great results, because I don't want to be like the non-achievers in the team". She consciously represented herself as 'towards' even though her language was revealing a more fundamental 'away from'-ness behind the apparent 'towards'-ness.

(The funny thing is she kept repeating that phrase until I demonstrated my understanding that the fundamental motivation direction was really 'away from'. Then the repetition stopped. It was almost as if there was an unconscious part wanting to be acknowledged!)

We might re-frame our experiences to prove our labels true. (The is an example of Confirmation Bias, handled below.) Take someone who has labelled themselves a 'towards' person. Let's say they're happily at work when the fire alarm goes off and people run past shouting, "Fire! Fire!" Flames and smoke leap lurches towards him. He cries, "Oh, God!" and joins the rush to exit. Afterwards, when asked, he might re-frame the experience to confirm the label: "I was moving towards staying alive." That's how he might remember it. However, if you were there at the time, calibrating them from the outside, you might have seen their genuine unconscious response was actually an 'away from' response.

How labels can be traps

Frogs Into Princes says, "Labels are traps". Personally, I'd refine that just slightly and say, "they can be". You see, I don't rule out the possibility that there might be good profiling tools. In fact, I'm currently very interested in something from outside NLP called the Enneagram.

Anyway, here's how labels can be traps:

Deciding someone is something is to make a generalisation about them. Generalisations tend to cause perceptual deletion and distortion. It can make us see what we think is true and miss what's really there. It puts a filter up between us and them that inhibits true calibration and sensory acuity.

I believe that interpersonal NLP is at it's best when we're as filter-free about the person we're with as we possibly can be. That way, we can better notice what's happening. That doesn't mean not having knowledge. It just means opening our perceptions up rather than filtering them down.

The duality of elicitation and installation

This is a philosophical question for you to ponder. When you give someone a questionnaire and tell them it makes them, say, 'a visual', or a 'towards' person, is that really an elicitation of what's really there — or is it an installation of what we've constructed?

How it's possible we could be deluding ourselves when we decide our profile readings are accurate

I once raised these points with someone who really believed not only in Meta Programs based profiling, but on various other profiles, including handwriting profiles and astrological profiles. His objection was, "but every profile got my personality exactly right."

There's a well known experiment in Psychology by professor Hans Eysenck in which he tested whether astrology provided accurate predictions of personality. He asked a large group of astrology students to undertake one of his personality inventory tests and see if the results conformed to Astrological types.

Remarkably, he found they did.

However, when he repeated the experiment with people who didn't believe they had an astrological type, the results showed no correlation whatsoever.

Does this mean the astrology students answered the test dishonestly? Or that their belief in astrology had actually influenced their personality? Or, at least, their perceptions of their personality? It's unclear from what I know of the experiment. Maybe that was determined, maybe it wasn't.

Let's list some effects that might be at play here. There's Confirmation Bias, which predicts that we tend to filter for confirmation of our beliefs — sorting for what confirms and dismissing what doesn't. There is also Pygmalion Effect, which predicts that people tend to achieve the results expected of them, i.e. they actually change to match the expectation.

All these effects, plus the duality between elicitation and installation, could account for why people tend to perceive their personality profiles as accurate. If go back to the example of the lady who was 'away from', she had generated many examples that corroborated the label (you might say, 're-inforced the generalisation') but had filtered out all the counter examples where she didn't work that way.

(As for astrology, we mustn't ignore that readings tend to use the kind of artfully vague language that can make them seem to fit anyone. Perhaps the predictions offered by certain profiling tools are not that dissimilar.)

In a nutshell ...

Don't be fooled into thinking that NLP is about personality types. That's an age-old error. Learn to track the dynamics of what people do, not label them with a static type. And I mean what they really do, not what they think they do.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

How NLP helps business professionals

2011-07-18T13:21:00.000-07:00

We're in the run-up to the first run of my NLP Practitioner training in Kent and I thought I'd spend a few blog posts reflecting on my own experiences of how the training helps people in different ways. And what better place to start with where I entered it: business.

I hadn't heard of NLP till I'd already done about fifteen days of training in it. I was an up-and-coming IT consultant and enrolled on two training courses (Negotiation and Influencing Skills, and Influential Communication Skills) and a management development programme which dealt with matters such as leadership and getting the best out of your colleagues. They were the best training I'd done. Why? Because it wasn't chalk-and-talk. It was experiential. We were presented with pragmatic models and ideas and then thrust into using them and getting real-life feedback. I exited those programmes doing new things and they really worked. I suspected the content of these courses came from a common stock, so I asked. It was NLP. I sought out my first official NLP Practitioner training and was simply delighted to find there was even more to it.

Anyway, back to how NLP helps business professionals.

The first thing that springs to mind is business outcomes aren't achieved in isolation. During the course, we'll develop everyone's ability to develop excellent rapport with clients and colleagues, to develop creative co-operation. One of the things that helps is being positive, creative and resourceful yourself. NLP teaches excellent strategies for being 'at cause' in your own state of resourcefulness.

One of the things I've found valuable is the ability to use really powerful questions to gather customer wants and needs with precision, often helping them clarify their own not-fully-formed thoughts in the process. It's an excellent rapport builder to demonstrate understanding and you can really help your clients get more when you help them like this.

The ability to 'calibrate' to other people and use language more flexibly helps professionals work much more influentially, helping make more effective presentations and elicit states such as excitement, creativity and motivation.

And, to stop before this sounds like a shopping list, other key things include effective goal setting, re-framing problem orientation into outcome orientation and strategies for problem solving and negotiation. Not to mention the ability to coach oneself and others.

These were certainly the things I got out of the training and why I became an advocate.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Is hypnosis bad?

2011-06-06T16:51:00.000-07:00

Hypnosis. It's surrounded by myth, mystique and misinformation. Is it dangerous? Can it control minds? Only yesterday we had the news of hypnotist David Days, who knocked himself out, leaving his volunteers in a trance. It raised age-old questions, some revealing unnecessary fears.

Well, since the best antidote to myth is information, let's spread some. See, as a tool to help people make changes, hypnosis can be quite remarkable — but rumours of taking over people's minds, leaving them in dangerous states and making them do things against their will are, shall we say, greatly exaggerated.

Let's start by putting hypnosis into context. Though we're creatures with a conscious mind, most of our feelings and behaviours are unconscious. After all, if you had to consciously remember to, say, be afraid of spiders, and consciously engage in the process of getting afraid, the chances are you wouldn't do it.

Hypnosis supports the process of changing by having you lodge mental rehearsals and suggestions to be remembered afterwards at that unconscious level. The hypnotist will typically lead you into a state of trance, during which he or she can coach those activities and make those suggestions.

Trance is not unusual. You trance out every day actually, you just call it day dreaming. Your mind wanders off. You might become transfixed, not especially conscious of what's going on and somewhat oblivious to what's going on around you. It's not dangerous, you'd quickly snap out of it if you received some alert from the outside and you naturally come back to your senses. The only way a hypnotic trance is really different to day dreaming is that it's maybe deeper, but the same things are true. (As Derren Brown said on Radio 4's Front Row today, what would have happened to David Days' volunteers if he'd had to be carted off is that they'd probably either fall asleep for a while or just wake up.)

Now let's talk about whether hypnosis can make you do things against your will. Let's be clear on one thing. The hypnotist does not ever take over your mind. The hypnotist gives instructions and suggestions. In my experience, subjects receiving suggestions they object to easily reject them, even in trance, and there is always a degree of subject compliance in successful hypnosis. In therapeutic hypnosis, a degree of compliance is presumed in the process, as it serves a desired outcome. In stage hypnosis, the hypnotist simply heightens and unleashes the participant's latent desire to act up. (That desire is there, they check for it ahead of time.) It is never truly an act of mind control.

That's not to say we're not suggestible. If enough people tell you that you are focused on your goals when you're in an impressionable state, you might well start to notice it, believe it, act on it and make it real. We are all suggestible, some more than others. However, there's a big difference between getting someone to scratch their nose or believe something helpful and getting people to act without moral restraint.

Now, as Derren Brown demonstrated in his show The Heist (the one where he gets a bunch of middle managers to hold up a security van), it is possible to condition people to momentarily act out of character. However, that was a case of extreme Pavlovian conditioning, not hypnosis. It's also worth pointing out that although the participants presumably did not know where the show was going, they participated in the various conditioning exercises willingly, perhaps egged on by the presence of cameras.

I think the key thing to get across is that trance is neither mysterious, unusual nor dangerous (in fact, it's a very familiar experience); that there is no mind control; and there is always a degree of subject's compliance in successful hypnosis. With that compliance, the skilled hypnotists can really support the process of kicking bad habits, becoming more focussed and active on our goals, etc.

In other words, it's a positive resource and definitely nothing to be scared of.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Is it deletion we do, again?

2011-06-03T18:39:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I wrote on the question, Is it really deletion we do? Back then, I was thinking about the semantics of the word deletion. This time, I'm thinking about linguistics.

Here's a quick paragraph for people not familiar with the ideas this post discusses. If you're already up on this stuff, skip his bit:

It is often said that when we represent experiences to ourselves and speak, we delete, distort and generalize. It's a model of how we humans process information and end up with limiting generalizations such as, "I can't do that" and "you don't like me". It is derived at least in part from Noam Chomsky's theory of language, Transformational Grammar, which talks about deep structures, surface structures and transformations. The deep structure is the fully qualified version of a sentence, the surface structure is what was uttered and the transformations account for the difference between the two. Many assumed Transformational Grammar was a description of the mental process for generating language and that's what I address here. Anyway, this information model is useful in coaching, therapy and information gathering work and was introduced into NLP via the book The Structure of Magic, by Richard Bandler and John Grinder. They called their model The Meta Model.

Okay, re-cap bit over.

It always seemed improbable to me that, to speak, we would first create some deep structure sentence in our head and then perform complex transformations to generate the surface structure sentence we utter. It seemed like an awful lot of neurological work. And yet that's what we're often told, based on Chomsky's theory of Transformational Grammar. Even The Structure Of Magic Vol. 1, on page 35, seems to point us in that direction.

Enter Professor Ray Jackendoff and his book Foundations Of Language, a book I was pointed at when I was being mentored by Eric Robbie.

I learned many interesting things by reading that book. One is that Chomsky's theories of Transformational Grammar were actually not meant to be a description of the mental process. Jackendoff comes back to the point several times. On page 47, for example, commenting on the direction and movement implied by the language of Transformational Grammar: "Students are always reminded that the notion of movement is intended metaphorically," and, "No claim is implied that speakers actually move phrases around in their head."

I also learned that the Standard Theory of Transformational Grammar, though it may well have been state-of-the-art when The Structure Of Magic was written, is not state-of-the-art now. In the progression of Chomsky's theories, the roles of deep structure and surface structure were reduced with the advent of Government-Binding Theory in 1981 and obsoleted all together with the advent of the Minimalist Program in 1993. That's nearly twenty years ago!

Now, when I talk to NLP groups about this, I often get this objection: "But the Meta Model still works!" Yes it does. The Meta Model is not Transformational Grammar, it's is a model of the language and behaviour of successful therapists. It was coded through the lens of Transformational Grammar, yes, but remember: a behavioural model is not the same as its coding, just as a territory is not the same as its map. It is interesting to wonder what the language of the Meta Model might have been had it been coded in the age of the Minimalist Program. The descriptive words in the Minimalist Program include, among others, select, merge and move. However, it wouldn't change what Bandler and Grinder learned about what good therapists actually do and say.

So, the Meta Model still works and the prevailing metaphors still succeed in helping students build good intuitions about how to track and utilise language. That's what they aim to do. In other words, the package still works as an educational tool. I just think it's worth knowing about the changes in linguistics since The Structure Of Magic and that words like deletion are not necessarily literally the process by which we generate language.

Some notes:

Some books mistakenly describe the deep structure as the sensory experience behind the words in the surface structure. However Transformational Grammar (and The Structure Of Magic) is quite clear that the deep structure is a linguistic structure. (It goes: Experience → Deep Structure → Surface Structure.)

Jackendoff reminds us of the distinction between competence theories and performance theories. Competence theories such as Transformational Grammar merely account for the structure of language, not the neurological process of generating language. The process is the domain of performance theories.

I have no objection to the phrase, "that sentence contains deletions," even though it is nominalized and the phrase "contains deletions" is, shall we say, interesting. That's because it succinctly communicates our intuition that something is missing. My point here isn't that the triad words deletion, distortion and generalization form an inappropriate model. They install and communicate intuitions about language very well. My point is that there is a difference between communicating intuitions about the structure of language and the process of generating language. To infer 'we delete information' from 'information is deleted relative to what could have been said' may itself be a distortion.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

How to miss a point

2011-04-21T01:29:00.001-07:00

Let me share an amusing experience I had recently.

I was together with a handful of really clever people I casually know and we were just chit chatting. I'd just read a science article that I thought was interesting so I showed it to the guys with a view to discussing it.

Well, rather than discuss the content, the guys immediately got fixated on the presuppositions, the modal operators, the use of 'all', 'every', etc, the structure of the metaphors, etc.

In NLP parlance, they started Meta Monstering it.

The ability to do this is wonderful. It's just that on this particular occasion I thought it was the content that was interesting.

That episode reminded me of a quote from Bruce Lee: "JKD (his art) is like a finger pointing to the moon. If you concentrate on the finger, you'll miss the moon."

On this particular occasion, I thought that apt.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve

A noddy take on motivation

2011-04-18T10:54:00.001-07:00

Recently I was asked to give a talk on motivation. A member of the audience asked me why she feels more motivated to eat unhealthy foods than healthy, even though she knows it's bad for her.

I decided to present a really simple analogy. It's noddy and by no means scientific but like all good analogies it elicited smiling, knowing recognition and, more importantly, waves of creativity.

It goes like this.

Imagine two paths in front of you.

Somewhere down the first path is the experience of you being really healthy. It's an experience that makes you go, "yea!". The only trouble is that in front of it, nearer to you, there's the experience of what you have to do to get there. Maybe that's an experience that makes you go, "Eww!"

Down the other path is an experience of you being unhealthy. It's an experience that makes you go, "Eww!" Thing is, in front of it is an experience of you eating the foods you love, which makes you go, "yea!"

It's like, you're aware of the consequences, but they're in the distance and what's in front of you right now is the immediate "eww" and "yea."

This was how this lady laid out her choices. Isn't it interesting how many possible ways come up, for how she could do things differently?

Working out how people construct their subjective experiences can give us so many ideas!

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Influencing isn't about tricks

2011-03-13T10:37:00.000-07:00

A lot of people seem to think that being influential and persuasive is about knowing clever linguistic tricks that tie people up in double binds.

Not a bit of it.

Think of someone of the really influential people you know. Do they really tie people up with linguistic martial arts? The ones I think of don't.

In my experience, the biggest - the biggest - factors in influence are the simple ones: the way you hold yourself; the way you use your voice; the way you build rapport; the way you listen; the way you feed back information; and the way you create and offer choices.

To this end, I've just finished devising a new course for my catalogue that I'm really excited about. It's called, "Speak with Influence!" and is going to be four days of teaching and coaching people to develop and exhibit the attributes of influential people.

In many ways, the content isn't new. There are no wheels needing re-invention. And much of the content gets covered on NLP courses. Nevertheless, this is the first time I've packed the material up like this, with this one single focus in mind - to get people speaking with influence.

Enjoy!

Maps, compasses, sat navs and getting things done

2011-03-11T01:14:00.000-08:00

I was once at a NLP workshop when someone asked the leader that classic question: "What's the process for persuading someone?"

Now, you might offer a high level approach something like: decide what you want to achieve and how you'll know you've achieved it; build rapport; iteratively move towards the outcome. However, this guy wanted something more specific than that. You know: the silver bullet; the n-step process for always getting what you want.

Hey, it's a reasonable question to ask when you don't yet know the answer. However, it's a bit like asking for the one football strategy that always works. It's interesting to ponder what would happen if one existed.

(And, by the way, you could replace the word 'persuading' in the question with 'modelling', 'changing', etc.)

The leader's answer was something along the lines that there isn't a fixed formula. Instead, the idea is to have a map, a compass, a destination, awareness of your bearings, a whole lot of different ways to move forward, and a good sense of whether what you're doing is moving you in the right direction or not.

I think that answer made a very good point - it's not formulaic, it's iterative. However, I imagined some poor traveller with hands full of gadgets and his head stuck in a fold-up map, flapping in the wind, trying to work out where to go next. It seemed burdensome and overly conscious.

Then, later, I heard the Sat Nav metaphor: you set up your Sat Nav and then set off. No compass-in-hand. No map on the lap. You can keep your eyes and ears on the road. The Sat Nav will call out when you need to turn. I liked that better. It seemed less burdensome. It seemed more like it.

Of course, no metaphor is perfect. The Sat Nav metaphor implies an external guide rather than an internal one. And the signals are more likely kinesthetic rather than auditory. However, we trust people to be able to bridge the gap.

Thing is: where do you download the map from? That's where NLP comes full circle. Continuing to entertain the metaphor, you partly download the map through modelling and you partly build the map through practice, experience and feedback.

So, what's the process for influencing people? There isn't one. But there is an investment that can be made in being influential. It's called learning and habituating the patterns of influential people.

Navigating your way to various kinds of interpersonal outcome is often less about explicit knowledge and more about innate knowledge. It's less about stepwise instructions and more about calibrating to what's happening. The trick is to acquire the innate knowledge.

In the end, it comes down to this: model, learn, practice. There's no substitute.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Three contemplations on success

2011-01-10T13:14:00.000-08:00

I have a little thought journey for you.

First, think about what you do to create 'success', whatever that means to you. What 'work' do you do to create it today? And how much?

Now, imagine you wanted to be ten percent more successful than you are now. My guess is you can imagine getting that by continuing to do what you're doing now, just maybe doing it a little harder, better or longer.

What if you wanted to be radically more successful? Like, quadruple your income? Like, move from a two bedroom house to a six bedroom one? Like, pay off your huge mortgage in less than a year? Like, go from being a team leader to being worldwide senior vice president? Could you do that by doing what you're doing now, just a little harder, better or longer?

Now think of someone you know, maybe someone famous, who's enjoying the kind of success that's just off-the-scale for you right now. Could you get that kind of success by doing what you're doing now, just harder, better or longer? Could they have got that level of success by doing what you're doing now, only better or harder or longer? The answer is, probably not!

Whether or not you really want radically different levels of success, and whether or not you believe you can, the point I'm really making is this:

Getting radically different levels of success generally requires you taking a radically different approach.

(And often it's about making things easier rather than making them harder.)

This, by the way, is why I think many people get a coach: not to get ten percent more by working harder or better or longer, but to make that kind of transformational change that enables a complete different set of results.

You don't have to act on this, but just think for a moment. What would your choice of radically different result be? And what would have to be radically different about the way you go about creating success, to build and maintain that? Like I said, you don't have to follow through, this is really just a little thought journey.

That was the first contemplation I had on success today. The second was to do with leadership. See, I was actually thinking about middle management leaders breaking themselves with stress to deliver results and comparing them with an even higher leader I know from another organisation, a role model with even more responsibilities, who isn't. The middle leaders I thought of don't really have a clear direction, try to micro-manage every element of success and have to drag a demotivated team along. By contrast, the higher leader i often use as role model sets a clear direction for his people and makes each one of them come alive with creativity and enthusiasm. Then he sits back, just correctively steering from time to time.

This was my second contemplation on success:

The easy way to lead success is to set good directions and know how to make the people that support you come alive.

Success is a bit like driving. If you have 1,000 miles to do, yes, you could put your foot down, drive 70 all the way, screech round bends, go non-stop till its done and beat everyone else. But, boy, do you arrive tired. And, is it really success if you've burned the engine out doing it? On the other hand, sure, you can do 70 on the motorways, but slow down for the bends and roundabouts, stop to rest when tired and check your oil levels. You might do the 1,000 miles slower, but after that you can do another 1,000 miles. And another after that.

And that led to my third contemplation on success:

Sustainable, long-term success is about what you can keep up day after day.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Can Paul McKenna make you happy?

2011-01-08T05:42:00.000-08:00

I see Paul McKenna's latest book is on the shelves: I Can Make You Happy.

I like Paul McKenna. He was one of the co-trainers on my first NLP trainer's training and I found him to be friendly, charismatic and dynamic, albeit - and he would admit this himself - vain.

I also like his books for their simple, easy-to-follow style. The simple promise of the Paul McKenna book is, if you actually use the book and do the exercises repeatedly (as opposed to just reading it), you will get the results. And I think in a lot of cases, that does prove true. I have personal experience of successfully using I Can Make You Thin. (Which, by the way, remains his best and most successful book.)

Paul courts controversy with his I Can Make You... brand. One legitimate criticism is that the work of coaches and therapists of often to undo peoples' belief that others have power over them, not install such beliefs. Another is it seemingly invites the reader to attribute any success to Paul rather than to themselves. Is that what he's thinking? I don't know. Maybe, given his vanity. I tend to think it's simply him modelling sales language and behaviour. The I Can... pattern is a sales pattern, after all. And it seems to work. When you put I Can Make You Thin next to Marisa Peer's alternative, You Can Be Thin, most people find the former to be a more assertive and motivating promise.

Whatever you think about the controversial promise, I think it's fair to say his simple approach appeals and he does seem to have helped a lot of people.

Now, I have to be honest, I haven't read the new book yet. It's appearance simply prompted me to think and comment on the Paul McKenna brand in general. Still, let's ask the key question: Can you be 'made' happy? Well, not 'made' as in 'forced'. Happiness can be elicited. And the habit of happiness can be developed. That's backed up by the work of people like Robert Holden. (Think of happiness as being like a muscle you can stretch, exercise and make stronger.) I also think people like Paul McKenna can lead you through the exercises. See, what is happiness? It's a feeling that comes from the thoughts we have in response to the world. Because we don't tend to engage in conscious choice about those thoughts and feelings, it's easy to think we have no control over them. Well, it's not that we don't have control, it's just that it's an habitual system that runs all by itself and it would be exhausting to consciously over-ride it all the time. Nevertheless, we can consciously intervene when we choose to do so. More importantly, we can 'brain train' such habitual systems.

So, yes, while I might question the exact phrase I Can Make You Happy except as an effective sales pattern, I do support the idea that the happiness habit can be developed with training.

Now, I'd better actually get on and read the book so I can review it properly!

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Don't think of Not

2010-12-29T00:35:00.000-08:00

We've had the horrible news this Christmas that missing Joanna Yeates was killed. It's an awful story and I feel so sorry about it. My thoughts go out to her family.

Today, I scanned the newspapers as I passed through Tesco. The Daily Mirror's front page is dominated by a huge picture of Joanna's boyfriend with the huge lettered headline, "NOT A SUSPECT".

Now, what does that do for you?

I'll tell you what it did for me. It required a double take. My instantaneous response was as if the headline had been, "IS IT HIM?" But, given about a second, I sorted it out in my head and worked out what was being said. Then a lady glanced at it and said, "I wonder if it's him."

See, the message here is clearly a clarification from police, presumably in response to what some people might be saying, that the boyfriend is not a suspect. He's clear. Even so, there was just something about the way that page was put together that seemed to require a double take by me and, apparently, the lady by my side.

Students of NLP and hypnosis will be all-too familiar with the idea that if you tell someone to not think of an elephant, they'll probably think of an elephant even though you asked them not to. This sometimes gets blown up into the somewhat absolute mantra, "The brain can't process negatives", or, even worse, "If you tell someone to not do something, they will do it". Well, it only takes the evidence of all those people who saw the "Don't drink and drive" campaign - and didn't drink and drive anyway - to know that one isn't strictly true. Without going into detail here, it really isn't as simple or absolute as these somewhat over-used, insufficiently-thought-about mantras suggest. Nevertheless, there is a genuine tendency in humans to befuddle, at least for a very brief moment, around the word not.

I wonder how many other people would have had that same double take.

And I like to think the Mirror didn't do this knowingly.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

A Christmas message

2010-12-24T03:59:00.000-08:00

Well, it's Christmas time again. And, if you celebrate Christmas, I wish you a very happy one. And, if you don't, of course I wish you the very best anyway. And I'd like to thank you very much for reading my blog throughout 2010.

So, what's on my mind at Christmas? Simple. It's happiness.

If I can share just one thing with you in this brief blog post, it's this: Like a lot of people now, I used to think happiness was something that happened to you. It was only later that I learned two very important things. First, how we feel about things has a lot to do with the stories we tell ourselves about what they mean. And we can let go of those stories. Second, even if it doesn't seem like it, we're all role players in the experience we have. And we can take some directional control of it.

In 2011, I'm looking forward to more coaching and training events in which I hope to help more people take directional control of how they feel and where they're going.

Until then, happy holidays.

Steve.

Are interviewers immune to sales skills?

2010-12-03T02:10:00.000-08:00

Before I get going on today's blog, I'll make an admission. This is pretty much copied from a post I made on NLP Connections, the NLP forum. It's just that after I wrote it, I thought it'd make interesting blog stuff, especially as some of my readers are in corporate world and get involved with recruitment and interviewing.

The question is: Are recruitment decisions totally conscious and objective? Is the recruitment process immune to so-called 'persuasion' skills?

Now, I don't claim universal truths about interviewers and interviewing, but let me comment on some of the interview boards I have experienced. They seek to be objective. The panel has lists of recruitment criteria and tick off, score against, and discuss with other panel members afterwards, to get group consensus and check decisions against the evidence. It's a good control element.

Nevertheless, people are subjective creatures. We're selective in what evidence we notice and are prone to confirmation bias. We can switch from one set of sorting filters to another as we respond to rapport and charisma. We're prone to respond to feelings, both towards and 'away from'. And with re-framing, the value, intention and meaning of any piece of evidence is open to being changed. In other words, we can always argue the evidence supports what we feel convinced about. And I've seen those things happen too.

The bottom line is people do get sold on people and rapport, charisma and persuasion is alive in the process.

In that sense, recruitment is not especially different to car buying. Buyers will generally enter the process with conscious criteria that sellers have to meet and there is plenty of scope on the part of the seller to be interpersonally influential.

So what does this mean for interviewers and interviewees?

Well, for interviewers, the message absolutely is not to throw away one's trusty feelings and make the process totally conscious. Our feelings are often very well trained and very reliable. If anything, I'd develop one's connection with them. Nevertheless, to make sure we're gathering information through more than just our own subjective filters, it's worth developing the ability to 'go meta', to check what's happening from the outside and check the data being presented through different sorting filters.

For interviewees, I think the message is to be good on both levels. Be sure you can match the conscious criteria but also be good at rapport, charisma, etc.

The skills we teach really do go way beyond one-on-one coaching work.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

On being influential

2010-11-30T11:41:00.000-08:00

I still haven't listened to that radio 4 programme about NLP. I guess I've just been too busy. I did catch a trailer, though. In it, one guy asks the other for an example of how NLP works in persuasion and the other gives this example of what he calls a double bind: "Do you want to sign the contract now or later?"

Let's put to one side whether or not that really is a double bind. I just groaned. It's not that this isn't a legitimate linguistic pattern, it's just I hope people don't think persuasion is all about one-line shots like that. I mean, would that, as a single line, with no other investment in the relationship, work on you?

Now, there's no pre-canned process for influence and persuasion. It's largely about calibrating to the people you're working with. We can paint a very broad picture of it, though. Let's use the well worn example of selling a car.

The first thing to assume with selling a car is that you're selling to someone who is at least potentially interested in buying one, or could use one. It generally starts with having some clear idea of what outcome you want to engineer. It involves investment in rapport, to develop positive, willing responsiveness between the two of you. During the process, you'll generally want to gather information. What's important to the customer about a car? What would having a car do for them? What's the structure of their subjective decision-making process? What kind of sensory information do they really respond to? Along the way, you might want to help them work out any incongruities in what they think they want.

The key thing in influence is that when you present, you're not presenting data. You're helping people build a vivid sensory experience - an experience they can respond to and get convinced by. If the customer is a family man looking for safety and economy, you might want to sell him your safest and most economic car and help him know what it's going to be like to feel protected, and to pull into a station and spend less. If they're looking for something sporty and it's the kinesthetic experience that gets them going, you might want to have them know ahead of time what it's going to be like taking this thing on a country road with the top down, feeling the wind in their hair. You can't do that incongruently. You have to be able to put juice into your presentation. You have to be able to stretch your vowels and use your voice and body effectively.

It's about matching what people respond to and building motivation. That's influence. When you've got someone ready to buy, that's when you can start congruently presupposing their going to sign the contract.

Martin Luther King didn't influence people with one-line tricks. Neither did Churchill. Or Dylan Thomas. Influence is about building responses, using several skills of communication simultaneously. It's about how you observe, listen and communicate. It's about being able to work with the structure of the customer's subjective experience. It's not hard, but it does require learning and practice.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Why is north up?

2010-11-16T08:07:00.001-08:00

I heard something really interesting on Radio 4 just now. Apparently there was a lecture recently whose theme was this: it is only arbitrary that we draw north at the top of the map, and yet this representation has influenced two thousand years of political history.

Someone near me said, "That's silly. Of course north should be drawn at the top of the map. Everyone knows north is 'up'."

I asked, "How do you know?"

He replied, "Just look at any map."

I had to chuckle. I though that was a perfect demonstration of how circular our beliefs and conceptualisations about how things work can be.

Mind you, I had to admit to myself, I had a tough time imagining the world and the solar system being the other way up. It still felt 'upside down' to me, even though, in space, there is no real up and down. Which I guess goes to show how firm those conceptualisations can be.

How easy do you find it to imagine the universe being the other way up? How easy would you find it to keep it that way? Oooh.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

On nomenclature in NLP

2010-11-15T03:47:00.000-08:00

Every so often, when I'm with other NLP practitioners and trainers, a discussion comes up about the names given to various concepts. One such discussion came up this last weekend and it inspired me to blog.

In NLP, it is said we delete, distort and generalise information. It's the accepted lingo, we all use it and, hey, no problem. However, if we're going to be really precise about it, is it really deletion that happens, or is it non-selection? Or maybe even a bit of both? And, no, they're not the same. If I have to pick a team of five players from a line-up of twenty, I don't delete fifteen players from the team, I just don't select them for it. They're still available for selection if someone prompts me to do so.

Now, let's say there's a guy called John and he says to me, "I was hit." It is claimed the identity of the hitter has been deleted. Well, if that was really true then when I ask for the identity of the hitter, the answer should be, "I don't know any more." And it isn't.

In fairness, we didn't ask: deleted from what?

See, in fairness, the word 'deletion' isn't used to suggest deletion from memory, but just from that particular linguistic representation of the experience. Nevertheless, as with the football team analogy, was it deleted from the sentence or not selected for it when it was formed?

So what?

Maybe nothing. Maybe it's just a philosophical point.

The bottom line is nomenclature is rarely, if ever, totally precise in any field. Sure, we could agree that 'non-selection' is more precise. On the other hand, we might not! Either way, when an existing nomenclature has taken hold it can be hard and even confusing to roll out changes.

For these reasons, I've learned to be relaxed about whether the nomenclature is exactly right in this and other fields. It is, nevertheless, an interesting exercise to really think about the words that are used and the concepts they represent.

Wishing you wealth and happiness,

Steve.

Sensory acuity - it's a stretch!

2010-11-09T12:17:00.000-08:00

Some courses you do just once, because you learn something and then have learned it. Others aren't like that, though.

Take sensory acuity. Sensory acuity training is all about stretching your ability to pick up information through your senses, principally so you can gather information more effectively as you work with people. It's a great communications and coaching skill and has nothing to do with 'mind reading', though it can appear like that to the untrained eye.

To the comedic pair who miss even the most obvious non-verbal signals from one another, the ability to detect the general state of another person might seem like magic and mind reading. And yet that's just basic sensory acuity.

Then there's picking up on people's little unconscious signals, like their 'yes' and 'no' signals. That can be a little bit more advanced.

There's being able to tell how someone is thinking from the outside, like are they making internal pictures or tuning into internal sounds. That's pretty basic too, once you learn the give away signs.

What about being able to tell whether those internal pictures are big or small, close or near? That's a bit more advanced. And then even more advanced still is being able to tell if those internal pictures are colour or black-and-white.

Are we done yet?

I've just come back from two days stretching my sensory acuity skills with a great bunch of people. I do this at least once a year now. We work with one of the world's top trainers of NLP, Eric Robbie. Eric was, I believe, the first Master Practitioner in the UK, was one of the first trainers in the UK and, for five years, was Richard Bandler's on-the-road co-trainer. He's about as top as it gets, in other words. He developed the sub-modality eye access cues and has about the most acute senses I have ever experienced.

When I first met Eric, he asked my friend Jamie if he was a family man. Before Jamie could answer verbally, Eric said, "You've got three children, age two, four and six." And he was right. That's how much information he could pick up from Jamie's non-verbals while he was constructing the verbal response. And I've seen Eric do things like that time and time again.

Sensory acuity isn't something you do once and have done. It's not a 'digital' skill, it's an analogue one. However good you are now, I'll bet it's possible to improve one notch or more. My guess is no one is anywhere near the limit of what's humanly possible in terms of sensory acuity. More pertinently, if you don't keep stretching your skills, I'll bet it's also possible for them to recede one notch too.

Saying, "I've done my sensory acuity training" is a bit like saying, "Hey, I don't need to go to the gym, I went last month."

Keep stretching your sensory acuity.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Why oh why

2010-10-26T12:40:00.000-07:00

What's up with the 'why' question? It often gets bashed when people are learning the skill of coaching personal change and many learners, frankly, never get to find out ... err ... why.

Well, first things first. It's not bad, it's not banned, and, no, NLP does not say thou shalt not use it. NLP isn't a bunch of rules, it's a bunch of ideas and models bound by a methodology. And the 'why' question is perfectly good some times. Nevertheless, there's a good reason why trainers steer new learners away from the 'why' question when learning their new skills.

Think about it. When we're working with clients to coach them and help them, what are we out to achieve? It's not to satisfy our curiosity. It's to artfully open the client's belief system and change their direction.

Now, what happens when you ask, "Why?" Generally, it's an invitation to construct a defensive justification. And think about it. When you're trying to help someone change, do you really want to invite them to rationalise and justify their limitations?

Here's the coaching tip at play here. Question to open up and change the structure of the client's subjective experience. Not to build justifications.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Do you use the Pygmalion effect?

2010-10-21T12:29:00.000-07:00

I know that, to some, it seems a bit 'new age' to promulgate changing your life by changing your beliefs. It might seem even more new age to change someone else's life by changing your beliefs about them, but there's a genuine psychological basis for belief and expectation being a factor in the outcomes one gets. Or, as some might say, attracts.

Enter the Pygmalion effect.

Put simply, the Pygmalion effect is the effect whereby people tend to get the results they expect to get, based on their beliefs about themselves and what they can do, in turn influenced by the expectations others have of them, such as teachers and mentors. (This is why it's not cool to get people labelling themselves as things like 'stupid' and 'bad'.)

To use the Pygmalion effect is to bring out the best in others by, well, congruently expecting them to come through, and demonstrating to them that you congruently expect them to come through.

Now, is that all you need to succeed? Hey, maybe sometimes, but in general I would say not. Remember, confidence without competence can be a set up to a fall. Nevertheless, the Pygmalion effect does have within it an important lesson for coaches and trainers. Believe in your clients' ability to come through. And demonstrate you do. You may be surprised how much that one thing helps you be a more successful coach and get the best out of people.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

The trouble with deadlines

2010-10-06T09:26:00.000-07:00

It's often said, "A goal without a deadline is just a dream."

Well, yes, a deadline often focuses the mind, which is the intended effect. Some writers really come alive when the deadline looms. There's no time for analysis paralysis, you just gotta get copy out.

Thing is, for a deadline to work, there has to be something real about it. Not getting the newspaper to press in time is real. Not reaching your financial goals by July next year is not. I mean, what's really going to happen if you haven't reached your financial goals by July?

Now, you could make the deadline more real by telling yourself you'll be a really worthless piece of shit if you fail. Y'know, give yourself something to move away from. And if that brings you joy and gets you achieving your goals, fair play to you.

But what if it doesn't bring you joy? What if it doesn't get you achieving your goals? What if it's left you kicking yourself in the ass?

You could do something a bit more wholesome: you could make it a game to meet the deadline, a worthy challenge. You could pump yourself up on how great it would be to achieve it by that date. But you're still faced with the issue that there's still nothing real about that deadline. As July creeps up on you, there's still nothing real to get a rise out of you. it's still too easy to just push the date out.

So, where am I going with this?

Simply here: Having a deadline has become one of the 'rules' of goal setting and it seems predicated on the (false) notion that everyone needs a deadline to get motivated. Actually, not everyone does. And deadlines don't always work.

Believe it or not, some people are actually turned off by deadlines, not turned on. Some people shrink under them, rather than grow. Some people die off, rather than come alive. I know some people who got active on their goals just because they were following their inspiration. It happens.

So, this isn't an attack on deadlines. Deadlines can be really good, I just don't get caught up in believing the 'rules' if they're not what's working. Have lots of tools, not just one. And be flexible. Calibrate to the person and the goal.

Wishing you wealth and happiness,

Steve.

Becoming your own adviser

2010-09-18T18:16:00.000-07:00

It's funny how many times I hear people speak something like this of their own challenges: "I'm stuck. I don't know what to do." And yet as soon as we start talking about somebody else's challenge, they know exactly what that person should do.

In a coaching conversation, I will sometimes shift the conversation to someone else's challenges. Why? Partly to break the "I'm stuck" pattern, but also test this phenomenon. If the person responds as above, I know I can use this as a resource.

Are you the kind of person who sometimes feels stuck with their own challenges but can think quite clearly about someone else's? If so, try this. And if you're a coach, put it in your box of tricks.

When you hear the magic words, "I'm stuck":

First, switch to speaking about someone else's challenge and get your clients advice for it. (Like I said, this breaks the pattern, tests if your client is apt to respond to the invitation, and sets the frame for the next part.)

Something like this should be able to open it up:
"You can't be the only person in your place of work who has challenges. What problems have other people got?"
(Pick one. Let's say it's "Fred".)
"So what's his problem? What should he do?"

Then, put the problem in Fred's world:
"So let's say this was Fred's problem not yours. Not your responsibility at all. But he's stuck. He comes to you. Tells you the story. What would you tell him?"

When I do this, it's remarkable how often clear and expert self-advice comes out.

Of course, in NLP terms, this is really just a classic shift of perceptual positions, but without the formal set up.

Try it, see if it helps.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Setting up your own 'basics of success' scorecard

2010-08-17T15:06:00.000-07:00

One of my old martial arts teachers used to say, "If you want to be really good at this, stop yearning after the mythical 'advanced' technique. Just practice your basics every day."

Besides this notion (that sustained success in almost any endeavour is more about getting the fundamental basics right on an every day basis than anything else), there's a motto that, "What gets measured is what gets done."

Put those notions together and there's a powerful coaching idea you can apply to your own success.

Now, recently, I was coaching a management team. One of the things I noticed is that certain 'basics' of management weren't happening. When I enquired, I found there were a number of "can't because" style statements. I did two things. First, we did start tackling the "can't because" factors. Simultaneously, however, I set up what I called a basics of good management score card for each manager. It listed all those basics we agreed had to be done on a consistent basis to achieve success, like "Have you had 1-to-1 meetings with your staff?", "Have you checked your team's demand and supply profile?", and, given this was an IT area, things like, "Do you know the capacity plans for your team's supported infrastructure?".

One-on-one, in our coaching sessions, we would fill in the score card. With things being measured, the managers could clearly see what was not getting done. (It was like holding up a mirror, or showing a presenter-in-training a videotape of themselves in action.) They all started wanting to get higher scores. Indeed, it even started a little healthy competition between them. Most of all, the mind set started to shift from "why we can't" to "how we can".

This is an idea I've employed in business and management coaching before. (In fact, I've just used it again, which is why it sprang to mind!) And you can apply it to your own success too.

So, here's a self-coaching tip.

1. Decide what it is you want to succeed at.

2. List the fundamental basics which, when practised on a consistent basis, are foundation to that success.

3. Create a score card with those things. And start scoring them.

4. When you start noticing which fundamental basics are not getting done, check out how you can change that. (This is where you might need some 'drill down' coaching from yourself, a friend or a professional coach.)

5. Keep going!

Now, does this seem simple? Basic, perhaps? Well, this idea is all about how consistent basics are often the key to success!

Extending the idea to a balanced score card

In business, there is also the idea of a balanced score card. This is a score card that ensures you pursue all your key goals in balance, as opposed to succeeding at just one splendidly while the others suffer. You can apply this to your self coaching too. Simply decide what holistic suite of goals you have in various areas (money, relationships, etc - typical "wheel of life" stuff) and what the fundamentals are of achieving all of them in balance.

So, if one of your goals is to be at the right weight and healthy, the basics of that might be to ensure you have your five-a-day (of fruit and vegetables) each day, to exercise each day, etc. Just don't create so many things that the score card itself becomes onerous.

This stuff can be very powerful in making success happen.

Oh, and by the way, one of the key things about these score cards is they aren't always necessary forever more. Sometimes, it's just the nudge you need at one time to get you attending to the basics. Once those basics are habitual, you probably don't need to keep scoring yourself.

So, what are the foundational basics of your success?

Enjoy!

The art of asking great business questions

2010-07-23T16:02:00.000-07:00

In NLP, there's this thing called the Meta Model. It's a model of how people make their subjective experience and how, as a great communicator, you can get them to re-make it and so turn their thoughts, feelings and behaviours in an entirely new direction. It's a great tool for influence, leadership and coaching.

Now, when people first learn the Meta Model, they tend to learn it as a simple tit-for-tat exchange with no particular order or direction. Y'know, "I'm bored", "How specifically are you bored?" and the like. Well, if you learned it that way, that's just a way of getting started. Very soon, that pattern becomes annoying, pointless 'Meta Monstering'. It's not what the Meta Model is really all about and it's definitely not the end of the line.

The real benefit of the Meta Model is to be able to work out where you want to go with a person or persons and construct great questions and postulates that completely shifts their frame of reference and moves them in that direction. The good ones go way beyond the simple tit-for-tat.

Here's an example. I was consulting with a client about a major software purchase. Before buying, the client wanted to speak to some other customers and check out the vendor's after sales service. So, we met. A panel for my client. And the purchasing manager from the reference company, Joe. The questions from the panel included ones like, "How well does the vendor respond to such-and-such?" and "Have you ever had any problems with them?" All reasonable questions drawing not particularly remarkable responses.

As the time we had started to run out, I could sense the panel wasn't really getting to where they wanted to be.

I figured what the panel really wanted was to be either be convinced they wouldn't regret buying - or know why they would. One or the other. And I figured the reason the questions weren't getting to the heart of the matter is they had Joe elucidating his past experience, rather than the panel's probable future experience.

So I asked this question: "If we chose this software and ended up regretting it, what would be the probable reasons why?"

Now, that's not one of the pre-canned, standard tit-for-tat Meta Model questions, but it is the Meta Model at work. It shifted where Joe was, from his past to the panel's future. And it asked for what the panel really wanted: to be convinced they wouldn't regret or know why they would. It took everyone where they needed to be and caused an instant physiological shift all round the table.

(The interesting thing here is the question was as much to shift the panel and it was to shift Joe. It was to get them both moving in a new direction.)

As it happens, Joe really struggled to think of anything to answer the question with. After much looking up, side, down-right, etc, he started to offer a list of fairly minor possibilities. This enabled the panel to get convinced.

Remember, the Meta Model isn't just a simple fill-in-the-blanks tool. It can be a powerful ally in getting great business done.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

(By the way, there's nothing like really using NLP in business or coaching to really cut an ability for constructing great questions like this. Not every trainer is out there doing this stuff for real. Something to bear in mind.)

Whose day gets ruined?

2010-07-10T04:34:00.000-07:00

Every so often, a friend or a client will bitterly complain about something someone has done to them. Maybe it was the idiot who cut them up at the roundabout. Or the boss who dumped loads of work on them. Or the neighbour who parked in front of their house.

Talk about spinning feelings? (That's an NLP-ism, for those who don't know.) Yeah. Toxic ones! In fact, some people complain so bitterly they almost look like they're making themselves ill.

Thing is - when you get so embittered, whose day is getting ruined?

Not the person who did whatever. You. As if spinning toxic feelings in yourself somehow gets them back. It doesn't. It just ruins your day. Maybe even makes you sick.

Now, I'm not saying we shouldn't be angry about injustices. The world would be sad place if there weren't people fighting for what's right. But when it comes to petty daily squabbles, whether you ruin your own day or get on with it joyfully, it will make no difference. So you may as well do the latter.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Where does NLP come from?

2010-07-03T10:26:00.000-07:00

Continuing the NLP course related video casts, this video looks at where NLP comes from.

Enjoy!

What is NLP?

2010-07-03T10:23:00.000-07:00

We're in the run up to my next NLP training event, so here is the first in a series of related video casts.

Enjoy!

Can you see your own limitations?

2010-06-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

There's a quote: "I don't know who discovered water but it probably wasn't a fish." In other words, it's hard to know the limits of your world is when you live inside them. Well, yes if you don't know how. Only today I was reminded of the usefulness of a great idea called perceptual positions. It's something that comes up in my coaching work quite a lot, as well as being a great technique I use for myself, to check how I'm doing. It's the idea of stepping into other points of view as well as your own, to get more information about what's working and what's not. It's something I definitely recommend people get better at. And it definitely worked today!

Wandering and Wondering

2010-06-08T15:15:00.001-07:00

Hi everyone,

Welcome to my new video blog-tip! Today, I talk about wandering and wondering as a potentially under-utilised tool in being productive.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

Beware of confabulation in persuasion!

2010-05-08T02:22:00.000-07:00

There is a notion in persuasion that the pattern, "X, because Y" is generally more powerful than just "X". Like, "Karlo coffee tastes better than the rest because it uses genuine Jolob beans from the deepest regions of the Alinora river" is generally more powerful than just "Karlo coffee tastes better than the rest".

Politicians use this pattern. Sales persons use it. Lawyers use it. In fact, all persuaders use it. It's the most basic of persuasion patterns.

It works, but this pattern has a potential problem too.

If we move things round a bit, it's setting up this cause-effect pattern: "if Y (is true), then X (is true)". Which is cool if you can demonstrate Y is true.

Now, logicians among you will know that if Y is demonstrated to not be true, it says nothing about X. X could still be true. However, people don't tend to think logically. They tend to think in plausible inference. And in plausible inference, if Y is made less credible to the listener, X tends to become less credible too. (And, note: making something less credible is an awful lot easier than proving it is untrue.)

In other words, if a counter-persuader can sink Y with just inferences that make it less credible (it doesn't even have to be 'proof'), it tends to sink X too.

Politicians do it. Sales persons do it. Lawyers do it. In fact, all persuaders do it.

(And if you think about it, that's one of the things we may do with our coaching and therapy clients, when we use the Meta Model. If the client has a limiting "X, because Y" belief, we can help them become free of that belief by making it less credible.)

Now, here's the key point. Sometimes we're confident about an X being true but we don't know why. We don't have the "because" part yet. That doesn't stop us theorising. And doesn't stop us making something up. And it might be very plausible to us. Sometimes we can come up with reasons we're very convinced about. Like, "NLP works because ..."

Trouble is, that's called confabulation.

Whoa! Back up. What's a "confabulation"?

Merriam-Webster defines it as: "to fill in gaps in memory by fabrication." I suggest the word "memory" in this definition could be replaced by the word "knowledge". In other words, it's to 'gap-fill', to 'make up reasons for things'.

So, whether you're a politician, salesperson or general persuader, here are some key tips:

"X, because Y" is a powerful persuasion patten when Y is strong.
"X, because Y" opens the door for counter-persuasion when Y is weak.
If you want to be persuasive, be wary of confabulating your Y's.

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve.

A question of priorities

2010-04-25T01:04:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I bumped into someone who did some NLP training with me a few years ago. It was great to see her and she told me how she'd applied what she learned, got over a major anxiety, etc. (And she might be reading this, so "Hello!") It reminded me what a worthy profession it is, to really help people.

Before that I had another experience that saddened me somewhat. I decided to treat myself to a good old English breakfast while I was in town and I happened to sit a few tables away from an obese lady in a mobility chair. I felt sorry for her. And I was saddened when I overheard what she said. (I wasn't deliberately listening in, but you know how you can sometimes catch things.) She said, "... he recommended this weight loss coach to me and I rang him and it was £150 to join his group for ten weeks. Well, I'm not paying that."

Well, nobody wants to spend too much on anything, of course. I'm all for careful, judicious spending, getting immune to 'buy me now' hype and not buying things that aren't going to add value. Still, it made me wonder: do we always prioritise our resources correctly? Do we always realise the worthiness of investing in our own health, wealth, well being and success?

It's an interesting thought.

A language pattern for dealing with negativity

2010-04-09T17:55:00.000-07:00

Here’s a new bite-size NLP tip!

This is a really effective language pattern for dealing with negative behaviours in negotiations or general team work. Let’s say you experience some comment or behaviour that’s not useful to some process you’re trying to facilitate. The pattern goes: “You could [identify behaviour], but [point out the effect] so how about [alternative].”.

For example, “You could shoot down these suggestions, but that’s not going to help us solve our problem so how about we test a few out before we dismiss them.”.

By using the word ‘could’, you make it like the behaviour hasn’t really been committed to yet. It gives the person a chance to re-think and choose again. Once the negative effect of the behaviour has been pointed out and time to consider has been given, it’s hard for them to choose the negative behaviour again. Especially if you use the pattern with gentle “I’m simply pointing out what’s happening” authority.

As with all language patterns, appropriate delivery is required. It’s worth calibrating to the individual, to judge how best to deliver it.

More tips coming soon!

Wishing you health and happiness,

Steve

Feeding the faith and starving the doubt

2009-12-16T15:36:00.000-08:00

A famous sportstar once said this of the psychological part of his training: "I feed the faith and starve the doubt". When I'm doing confidence coaching, that memorable phrase sums up a significant part of the process pretty well. Today's blog post is a little tip - three things you can do to feed the faith and starve the doubt.

First is to give yourself some protection from people who actually do the opposite to you - feed the doubt and starve the faith. (Some of these people are actually managers!) Whenever you recognise someone is doing that, just imagine your in a protective bubble. You can see them, you can hear them, but somehow what they're saying is outside the bubble and can't get in. If you want, make it so the bubble distorts them and makes them look silly. And why not change the voice, to something like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck?

Second is to starve your doubt. The Meta Model questions are an excellent tool for unpicking thoughts of self doubt. No reason why you can't Meta Model your own internal thoughts. ("I can't do that! But, hey, wait a minute - how do I know? Who says? What would happen if I did?")

Third is to feed the faith. Think of some beliefs that would really empower you - beliefs you perhaps sort-of have but would like to be stronger. Now write down at least five specific, real-life experiences that support that belief. Then, just cycle through them, re-experiencing each one. The more your neurology is bathed in all the supporting evidence, the stronger the belief gets. Especially if those toxic doubts are getting starved at the same time. And, each day, add something to the list.

That third part reminds me of a positive experience a lot of job seekers have when they write out their CV/resume. When confronted with just how much they have done in their career, many get a healthy confidence boost. That's the third step in action.

Enjoy.

The directions we face

2009-12-07T12:06:00.000-08:00

Corporate team meeting today. First thing on the agenda: "How's everyone feeling?". It's a nice, personable question. Unfortunately, the answers were not so positive. So the manager asks, "Why?"

Now, there's this myth in the NLP world that "why?" is the bad coaching question you should never ask it. Well, not quite. All questions have a value and "why?" sometimes gives you the very information you want to know. It's just that "why?" tends to get people arguing for their stuckness. (How does that saying go? "Argue for your limitations and they're yours"?)

So, after everyone had finished answering "why?", I asked, "If you could make just one thing different, what would it be?"

See, I don't mind having people face the direction of what's stopping them for as long as to gather some useful information, but I'm a great believer in turning people round and leaving them facing in the direction of what they want and what's possible. It's just the most resourceful direction to face.

So, here's a coaching tip for a day. Whoever you meet who might be unresourceful in some way, just turn them round to the direction they want to go. It's the kind of everyday coaching kindness that's the equivalent of just holding a door open for somebody.

Have fun and be well.

Steve.