Communications In Action

NLP
What on Earth is it?
Peter Freeth
NLP Workshop EA Summit 2003 2nd April 2003

Ingredients
What is it? What do I do with it? Whats next?

The interesting thing about an agenda is that its a summary that comes before the main presentation or meeting, instead of at the end where summaries usually come. Your audience will look at the agenda points, imagine what the topics are and decide right then what theyll listen to. You may have been on presentation skills courses that recommend tell them what youre going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what youve told them. This is fine if you only want to tell them instead of involve and engage them. I use Ingredients instead of agenda as it keeps the audiences mind open, and thats often a good state to be in when you want to learn something new and useful!

What is it?
Neuro Linguistic Programming A study of the relationship between language and behaviour Is there a structure of excellence? If so, can we replicate it? Advanced common sense Everything YOU do when you are at your best Modelling exceptional performance
NLP started out, about 30 years ago, as a study of exceptional communicators in the field of therapy. Richard Bandler and John Grinder wanted to know if there was an underlying structure to the results that a certain group of therapists were getting. These people were able to get results with individuals and families that other therapists could not even get close to, and these results came amazingly quickly. It turned out that there was indeed a structure and they published this in their first book Structure of Magic. Our language and behaviour are closely interwoven, and both are indicative of the way that we represent the world inside our heads. For example, you can close your eyes and still imagine seeing these words. Somehow, the words are still in your head and you can see them as if your eyes were open. The same thing happens with every component of your rich life experience and the way that you organise this experience is revealed in your language and your actions. At its heart, NLP is a specific, formal structure for modelling exceptional performance in any area where the high performing individual is unable to consciously explain how they achieve the results they get.

To make NLP
State Outcomes Senses Language Maps Hypnosis
New!

NLP training typically breaks the subject into six key areas. We wont be covering hypnosis in this presentation.

State
Your mental, physical and emotional condition States are useful in the right context States are a source of energy Successful people maintain their states!

Your state is the starting point for everything you do. When youre feeling good about yourself, you breeze through the day and easily deal with problems that would slow you down on a day when youre feeling miserable. If youre going to write your life plan or even your business plan you will write a more optimistic plan if youre in a positive state. In fact, states are neither good nor bad in themselves they are just useful in a context or not. They are either helpful to you in achieving your outcomes or theyre not. People who are good at achieving their outcomes are often very good at maintaining useful states regardless of what happens around them. This also implies that they can readily choose a state for a particular outcome, regardless of whether anyone else would label that state good or bad. In a world of logic and science, its easy to dismiss your state and say you have to get your job done regardless of how you feel about it. Well, you can certainly take this approach if you insist on making your life difficult and unpleasant! We know that people who take this approach tend to end up very stressed and unproductive. Wouldnt it be better if you could simply put aside whatever was on your mind and say whats the most useful state to help me achieve this? If, each morning, you could choose your state for the day, what would you choose?

State exercise
In pairs, ask for a memory with a strong emotional attachment a good one! Offer ruthless encouragement! Make the picture bigger Make the sounds louder Make the feelings stronger Enjoy it, then come back gradually

We practiced eliciting specific states in pairs, which is a very useful thing to be able to do. Remember that from states, people derive their perceptions of what happens and these perceptions influence behaviour. Therefore, someone who is good at managing other peoples states is generally very good at getting the best from people. Youve probably seen this happen at work, and youre probably good at this yourself in certain situations. NLP is about learning the structure of experience, so its about learning how you are good at managing other peoples states and using that skill consistently. Successful people tend not to do one thing much better than other people. They tend to be only slightly better than average people, but better consistently and across many skill areas. Learning about NLP will therefore make you consistently more effective!

State exercise
Pick a good state motivation, enthusiasm Picture
Location & size Qualities colour, movement, border, focus

Sounds
Location, volume, qualities

Feelings
Location, movement, temperature

Try it on have your partner help you

Is motivation, enthusiasm, fear or confusion the same for you as it is for me? It must be, because we use the same word right? No! Language is such a pale representation of the rich internal experience that we all have in our heads. What I call confusion is quite relaxed to other people. Someone elses confusion might feel like blind panic to me. The first step in understanding people better is to understand how differently we each perceive our common world. Its not enough to suspect that other people experience things differently its very useful to actually try on someone elses perceptions, and thats what we do in this exercise.

Outcomes
Pick a goal Check that its positive Check the pictures, sounds and feelings Check for ecology
If you get it, what will you gain? If you get it, what will you lose? If you dont get it, what will you lose? If you dont get it, what will you gain?

Would you take it right now?

The first step to getting what you want is knowing what you want. That might seem obvious, but youd be surprised how many people go round in circles in their lives because they know what they dont want, but not what they do want perhaps you know someone like this. This is one of the most important exercises in NLP well formed outcomes. Essentially, if you express a goal or objective in the format shown above, its more likely to happen. Later on, well play with some more advanced language that, when used with this tool, makes your wildest dreams practically inevitable!

Outcomes
Clear outcomes and flexible behaviour are the main tools of successful people Pick a character thats different to you
A teenager A five year old child A politician A parent Someone you know who is always right Someone you know who is very manipulative Someone you know who is a great negotiator
Once successful people know what they want, they are very open minded about how they achieve it. More than that, they are open to try anything, whether it will appear to work or not. Compare this to people who have a very fixed plan of action that doesnt adapt to changing circumstances these people frequently get frustrated and give up whereas successful people can easily adapt to new situations and new information in order to exploit those changes to their own advantage. Flexibility is something you can learn and practice, and this exercise demonstrates one of the easiest ways to do that. In the spirit of modelling excellent performers, you just borrow the skill you need from someone who has it! We are born modellers its how we learned to speak, walk and do most of the things that we take for granted today.

Outcomes
Pick a negotiation topic:
What to watch on TV Where to go on holiday What to have for tea

Negotiate in character become your chosen character, thinking and acting as they would

This exercise also allows participants to throw of the behavioural rules that normally restrict the results they get, so they can learn for themselves that sometimes the most effective behaviour isnt necessarily the one they would naturally choose.

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Senses
Noticing what happens Gathering high quality feedback Not imagining, but seeing and hearing! Rapport Empathy

Rapport is a communication channel

You may have seen the concept of matching and mirroring that goes way back to body language studies. In NLP training, youll spend some time on the subject of rapport, yet its really using your senses thats important. We spend much of our lives inside talking to ourselves, making pictures, doubting, questioning, even worrying instead of paying attention to what goes on outside. Developing the use of our senses to gather high quality external data gives us more information in order to make better decisions. Rapport is a state of harmony between two or more people. When people are in rapport, their physiology is closely matched and so are their internal processing systems. In other words, they look the same and they think the same. Think of someone that youre so close to that, sometimes, it seems that you can read each others minds. Is this telepathy, or is it a close synchronisation of mental and behavioural patterns? Rapport is often over-used in sales training, personally I think most customers today can decide for themselves whether they like someone or not and can easily spot the obvious tricks taught to less ethical sales people. If you agree with someone, youre likely to be in rapport with them. If you dont then you probably wont be. You should pay attention to the degree of rapport you have with someone as it reveals a lot about the way youre thinking and may give you important information that you werent consciously aware of.

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Language
Language and behaviour are interwoven Language predicts behaviour Language influences behaviour Both internal and external language
Generalise

Delete

For information to be stored in our memories, it is filtered to remove anything that were not paying attention to. This filter is made up of our beliefs, ideas, perceptions, preconceptions and of course our state. The filter works in three specific ways; Delete just ignore or remove sensory data Distort change sensory data so that it matches our expectations Generalise make sensory data less complex so that its easier to interpret You can probably think of many things that you do now that demonstrate those filters in action. Perhaps youve lost your car keys or not heard the phone ringing? Deletion. Have you interpreted something that someone said in a very different way and been certain that they said what you thought, not what they actually said? Distortion. Have you ever decided not to do something because it went badly last time? Generalisation. All of these filters are useful we could not function without them so being aware of them gives you the choice of how to respond and behave to situations, instead of letting your auto pilot decide for you.

Distort

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Get yourself going!

Internal language has a big influence on you Self criticism
Change it its your voice!

Motivation
Must Should Could Need Want Will Might Ought

Pick the one that works for you and rephrase your original goal

Do you nag or criticise yourself? The internal language that you use can have a massive impact on your state, yet no-one ever tells you how to use it effectively. Firstly, its your voice it can say anything you want it to say! Just like someone in the office who always complains, your internal voice will get very whiny if its criticism is ignored. Just think of the voice as another one of your senses which language is so think of the voice in the same way as you think of your gut reaction. The great thing about the voice is that it can be so much more specific. If your voice is overly critical or if you know someone else who nags themselves too much, theres a really simple technique you can use. You can easily tell when someone does this as theyll say things like I told myself I should have know better youll be amazed how much of what people say is quite literal. So, heres the trick when the voice criticises you, just answer it straight back with something like Thankyou! Now, what do you suggest I do instead? or Thankyou! Now, how is that feedback useful to me? Youll see that the structure is acknowledge then question, and youll be amazed at how well it works. The other amazing thing your internal voice can do for you is motivate you to get the things that are important to you done. Just pick the word that you use when you do something you naturally do easily, and use it to phrase the goals you want to achieve. For example, I should go to the gym tends not to motivate most people, whereas I will go to the gym is much more compelling.

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Maps
In your head is a complex 3D map of your experiences and beliefs Abstract concepts are represented in space Your perception of time affects everything! Imagination is reality

Your brain is organised like a filing room. The memories themselves arent necessarily good or bad theyre just raw data. Imagine you take an invoice and put it in the unreliable payer file. How would someone else treat that customer? Now put the same invoice in the good customer file and notice the difference. Now, take a memory of a holiday and put it in the great holiday file, and notice how the little mishaps and problems seem funny because, overall, you made the most of the holiday. Put the same memory in the holiday from hell file and notice how the things that did go well get lost amongst all the awful things. The interesting thing is, its entirely up to you where you file these memories, and once youve filed them, you can easily move them around!

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Mind reading
In pairs, ask your partner to talk about a recent experience Ignore the words Watch their eye movements, gestures and physiology Hear their voice tone, volume, pitch Notice where they locate different concepts Pay attention to patterns

You may have heard that only 7% of communication comprises words. Whether you agree with the figure or not, we can at least agree that words are not the only communication channel available to you. Our bodies radiate information about us all the time, revealing our thoughts, beliefs, state and even our values and interests. We naturally pick up on this information and use it to form intuitive opinions about people we meet. I think that one of the most useful things you can realise is that your intuition isnt an unsubstantiated guess, but is in fact the culmination of your brains ability to acquire and process huge volumes of information that youre largely unaware of. You really should trust your intuition more! When you really watch and listen to the way that people communicate, youll see all kinds of signals that reveal how they organise their internal memories. Youll see gestures and movements that tell you where they are, how they perceive time, how they deal with unhappy experiences, how they motivate themselves and much more. You dont need to know why they do this or what it all means it doesnt mean anything its just the way theyre wired up. Paying attention to this kind of information is very useful as it helps you communicate with other people much more elegantly and effectively.

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Changing the map

Take an unhappy or troublesome memory Move the picture further away, dimmer, smaller, fuzzier..gone Make the sounds quieter, more distant, an echo Move the feeling to the edge of your body, then let go of it Now try and remember how that memory used to trouble you
As a broad generalisation, people tend to be organised so that a picture associated with a memory has qualities that correlate with the emotional content. By changing the qualities such as picture size and location, you can change the emotional attachment. People do this entirely naturally, and you can hear them teaching each other to do it: Youve got to put it all behind you Ive pushed it into a dark corner of my mind I need to distance myself from it You can see them doing this too they point to the location of the picture and you can see them looking at it. You can help an unhappy friend by literally grabbing the troublesome picture and moving it further away!

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Changing the map

Take a happy memory and give it a word Bring the picture closer, brighter, bigger, clearer, more colourful Turn the volume up, clearer, closer Turn up the intensity of the feeling, spin it, move it, adjust the temperature Anchor it with a colour and the word

Conversely, happy pictures tend to be close, big and bright. You know how good it feels when you have a bright future, or when your life has some colour in it! You can associate complex emotional responses with very simple stimuli such as colours and sounds or words. When the state peaks, see the colour and say the trigger word. Afterwards, just see the colour and say the word and the state will come flooding back. Advertisers do this to you all the time, its another natural human process. So, if youre going to tidy out your filing room you might as well push away all the stuff you dont need and bring all the things that make you feel good about yourself up close, just as you would surround yourself with happy photos or mementos.

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So, what was it?

NLP is a way of modelling intuitive behaviour NLP has become entwined with its tools It has become associated with therapy, influence, communication and leadership Its a simple model for achieving excellence

Many people recognise the tools of NLP as being NLP itself. Remember that NLP wasnt invented in a cave in Tibet it was modelled from real people like you. Therefore, most of the tools are just common sense, refined, distilled and made into an easy to use format that we can all copy. Its quite usual for you to think that much of NLP is what you already do, because it is. Just dont expect everyone to do what you do! And, there are probably still times where you could use your skills more effectively or more consistently.

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What do I do with it?

Coaching Training and development Sales, PR and marketing Facilitation and mediation Business and personal planning Anywhere you can apply a model of excellence

Any area where you want to achieve consistently outstanding results

Here are a few applications for NLP in business. In fact, NLP can be used anywhere in business to get better results, so these ideas are just a few obvious ones where the results will be the most tangible, immediate and easy to introduce.

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What next?
Much NLP training is still not business oriented Websites for more NLP applications: www.ciauk.com www.theskillsnetwork.com www.nlpinbusiness.com www.changemagic.com Helping you get the results you want, more easily and more often!
There are many NLP training organisations in the UK, and some of them are now offering Business Practitioner courses. In the main, the people running NLP training come from a therapeutic or educational background, so their approach to business training still doesnt fit comfortably with what most organisations expect. This has resulted in a fairly slow uptake of NLP tools in an overt way in UK business, although youll find that the majority of good sales and soft skills training is based directly upon NLP its just not explicitly mentioned. The websites above are three places where you can find out more about NLPs application in business. And it goes without saying that I can help you apply NLP directly in your business to get better results quickly! You can contact me, Peter Freeth, and Id love to help you learn more about NLP and how you can use it to your advantage:

0870 1620802 [email protected] www.ciauk.com

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Famous last words

So, what on Earth is NLP? What can you do with it? Whats the first area where it can help you make a difference?

Many people ask me what can NLP do for me? and the answer is nothing. By learning about NLP and by getting better results more consistently, you can make a difference, because you can do anything you turn your mind to. I look forward to helping you achieve your wildest dreams, and I leave you with my favourite quote:

We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams..

Willy Wonka

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Communications In Action

Thank you!

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Communications In Action
Peter Freeth 2002 Communications In Action www.ciauk.com [email protected] 0870 1620802

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