Resourceful Change NLP Blog

While words themselves can’t hurt us, we must be careful of the metaphors we use because they often have hidden implications. The danger here is that we may unconsciously be directed or limited by those implications.

What is so important about the metaphors we use and what makes them different from other pieces of language? Metaphors are interpreters of context, so often correlate with high level change. We write the stories of our lives through our use of concepts within the limitations of our contexts, so where better to look for change than in our metaphors?

The implications of some ‘popular’ metaphors are less than useful, so it’s worth examining them here:

• work/life balance
  The implications here are many. Firstly that ‘work’ and ‘life’ need to be in equal balance, i.e. that work should be given as much time and energy as everything else put together. Secondly that work and life are the only two areas of focus to have a harmonious life. Thirdly, that work and life do not overlap and are exclusive concepts.

  If you think that last one is a stretch, let me tell you a story that underlines the point. A while ago, I was at a friend’s barbecue and was introduced to an acquaintance of his. He was struggling with his workload and was near burnout. Part way through the conversationI noticed that he was treating work and life like opposites, rather than overlapping concepts.

  So I asked him what the opposite of work was. “Life”. And then what the opposite of life was. At this point he went a little pale. He realised that throughout our conversation he had been telling me that he was only ‘living’ when he was not working! Understanding this, he was able to begin finding ways to see work in a more positive light.

• Leadership of self
  The key implication here is that we have an ‘internal leader’ – and an internal ‘follower’ too. Leading and following is a two-role process, so ‘leadership of self’ indicates some sort of internal division or conflict, in my opinion. I’d use a different metaphor which implies internal integration and cooperation.

A better metaphor
My purpose here is not to create “word fear” or the sort of internal censorship that came with “political correctness”. I’d prefer you examine the implications of the metaphors you use in everyday life, especially in areas that you consider less than optimum. And through such consideration, choose to live through more empowering contexts and narratives.

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Sometimes we can get useful and impartial feedback from a friend or colleague. This feedback is necessary for continued growth, skill and ability.

Very often we have to give ourselves feedback and this is where the difficulty can arise. Suppose you’re in a situation where only the evidence of your own senses would be useful in determining whether you’re doing something correctly. In target shooting, for example, anyone can tell when you miss the bullseye – only you can tell whether you’re sighting correctly.

The trouble is that so much information is available to our senses that we have to filter out the bits that aren’t important and focus on the bits that we need right now.

Exercise – Go into another room and spend a minute noticing all of the things in there that are blue, then come straight back.

Go do it now before reading on. It’s important that you have the experience, not just the information.

All done?

Now take a minute to list all of the red things in that room.

I’ll bet that’s much more difficult than making a list of all the blue things. That’s just one example of how your focus can limit your awareness.

So ‘focus’ is one of our filters. Our beliefs, attitudes and values also act as filters.

Most of the time this is okay and the system works just fine. The trouble arises when the feedback we need gets ‘filtered out’ by our beliefs, attitudes, values or focus.

As an example, suppose you have the belief ‘I am good at football’. Chances are that your belief is based on, and supported by, examples of when you played football well. And in order to keep that belief in place, your reality must continue to support it. You must have some ongoing evidence when you play.

Suppose you play badly one time. Certain processes will come into play.

(i) Consistency – we all have a strong drive to have experiences that agree with each other and fit into patterns. When an experience doesn’t fit the established pattern, the natural tendency is to explain it.

(ii) Attribution – we all have a strong drive to attribute meaning to events in order to make them fit with our inner values, beliefs and attitudes. The crucial part of this process is where we attribute meaning.

So, the natural tendency is to explain the time we played a bad game. The key is, do we:

1. attribute blame elsewhere (i.e. explain it away) or
2. accept the feedback and improve our game as a result?

In the first case, we get explanations like

“it was just bad luck”,

“the weather was too hot/cold/rainy”,

“my teammates were at fault”,

“the referee was at fault”

and so on.

None of those explanations allows us to improve our game or learn anything new. They keep us nice and safe and comfortable – and stuck.

In the second case, we get questions like

“what do I need to do to play well in that situation?”,

“where exactly do I need to improve? ”,

“what was the key difference between that game and previous ones?”,

“how can I make sure that I play better next time I’m in that situation?”

These questions bring us outside what we normally experience and promote awareness in new areas.

In short, they focus us in areas where we’d been filtering out the information we need. Now that they’re part of our focus, the information will get through more easily and we get useful feedback.

Roesch and Amirkham (1997) found that experienced athletes made more careful attributions, giving them the feedback needed to improve their performance.

Consistency and Attribution are part of our natural mental processes.

So next time you find yourself explaining things away or placing blame elsewhere, you have a choice. You can explain it away and place blame or ask yourself questions that promote self-growth and learning.

The choice is yours.

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When I started out with NLP, my first experiences were motivated by an interest in communication, so I focused most on those aspects of my development. From a scientific perspective, I was thoroughly intrigued by the NLP methodology.

I had some skills and very few specific techniques, so I got very good at asking questions and exploring through feedback. In many cases this is the best way to learn something, as the distinctions formed through experience are the most persistent and personal type of learning. In this way, NLP becomes part of experience and part of life.

Experiencing NLP

Since NLP is a way of working and a way of looking at the world, a good way to begin is to start to notice many of the things that NLP training aims to make us more aware of.

Above all, approach this in a playful way. Have fun exploring the new world this opens out.

One thing about memory is that we tend to recall things when we’re in the same state in which we learned them.

So if you’re putting yourself under a bit of pressure, then stop…

Take a deep breath.

Take your mind back to the ‘where and when’ of that learning

and re-connect with it.

Playfulness and fun are two of the states we use a lot in the process of teaching NLP. This is one of the many reasons we do that.

NLP Awareness

Notice when people you know go in and out of states. Anchor the useful ones and test your work. Have everyone around you become more resourceful and motivated this way.

Be aware of the language used by people you meet every day, their tonality, rhythm and inflection. Practice matching those distinct unconscious elements in your communication to achieve better rapport.

Listen for metaprograms and filters and tailor your communication to bypass them.

Prepare, practice, calibrate and improve.

As for the many techniques, work on yourself, help out friends and family, coach colleagues. Above all, remain open to accepting sensory feedback throughout and draw useful distinctions.

NLP Development

Keep yourself open to learning and you will continue to develop. People tend to plateau because they’ve stopped learning. Their internal model of that area has crystallised and extraneous pieces are streamlined away.

While that is a healthy and natural process, you should bear in mind that if there’s still room for improvement, you may have crystallised your learning too soon. Fortunately, our unique teaching methods can reopen the learning process and build positively on this solid foundation.

The key distinction is that a model is not reality and rules can be made to flex, bend and even break constructively, forming new distinctions. Learning through experience is essential at this point, provided these experiences occur within a specific set of boundary conditions. And all in a playful way.

Practicing NLP

Look at the world. Pay attention to the people around you. Find excellent people and ask if you can model their skills. Be curious and enjoy asking thought-provoking questions and you’ll find that everyone does something really well.

If you ask yourself, ‘how can I use these skills to great effect in work/at home/in my pastimes,’ you will benefit greatly from understanding more about the people in the world around you.

I began my journey in a search for better means of communicating. I found a lot more than that. If you make the awareness and methods part of your life, you’ll never have to practice NLP.

Just enjoy your life.

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In the first part of this piece, I described how thinking in polarities can limit your thinking. It’s actually a hypnotic structure in language based on the word or. Choices are artificially limited: “should we do X or Y?” limits you to just two choices instead of the entire field of possibility.

Polarity combines with this structure to force a choice between absolutes: “should we do it: yes or no?” There are many more of these binary choices presented to us every day, forcing black and white decisions in a world with many more colourful choices.

Good/Bad

Good/Evil

Right/Wrong

Guilty/Innocent

For us/Against us

Enemy/Friend

and on it goes.

To de-hypnotise yourself from these polarities, you first need to be aware of them as they occur. Then move beyond those limited choices. After all, if it’s not right and it’s not wrong – then what is it?

If you don’t see any other choices, then that’s a good indicator you have a mental ‘blind spot’ or a gap in information on your mental map.

A good way to fill in such gaps and remove blind spots of this sort is to collide the polarities using an NLP technique called the visual squash. Here’s how it works:

Exercise: Closing gaps with the visual squash.

1. Identify the two ideas or polarities you want to integrate.
2. Hold your arms out in front of you, hands apart, palms facing up.
3. Imagine one of the ideas in your left hand. Does it have a colour, shape, sound, texture, temperature or weight? Make it as real as possible.
4. Imagine the other idea in your right hand. Does it have a colour, shape, sound, texture, temperature or weight?
5. Understanding that at a higher level everything is one, allow your hands to move closer to each other only as quickly as your unconscious can bring those concepts together.
6. Imagine a line of communication between the two, connecting them as they continue to move closer.
7. When the two concepts meet/combine, you might have a flash of inspiration, opening up new possibilities, or the two ideas might just seem to work better together. Or you may not be conscious of the specifics of the change and the connection will become apparent later.

After doing this exercise, often you will find a spectrum of options instead of just two poles, opening up a world of greater choice.

Sometimes the process will ‘collapse’ the duality – especially if the two elements are true opposites. This is also a beneficial result because it allows you to see choices elsewhere, rather than just between the two extremes you started with. The only way to know what this can add to your choices is to do the process and find out for yourself.

Is polarity thinking good or bad? Now you know a better question to ask yourself.

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When you have a problem, where is the first place you look for a solution?

If your answer is that you look for the opposite of the problem, then you’re probably looking in the wrong place.

It’s a popular saying that a problem always contains the seeds of its solution. This is true. However it also contains the opposite of the problem, which is frequently mistaken for the solution.

This ‘polarity thinking’ is flawed. The opposite isn’t often the solution – frequently, it has the same structure as the problem itself.

For example, take someone who is shy – “I’m not going to talk to anyone because I’m scared to“. Compare that to the brash overconfidence created by polarity thinking – “I’m going to make a point of talking to everyone because I’m scared to“.

The problem hasn’t gone away. It’s still there in the “because I’m scared to“, so the solution isn’t in either the problem or its opposite. It is to be found beyond both of those.

Often people can only see beyond the polarities when they collide them and they cancel each other out. This collision of opposites is a mode of though employed by the philosophers of old and is the fundamental mental practice in yoga. (all of the physical stretching in modern yoga is somewhat peripheral to this aim, however)

Additionally, polarity thinking leads to overcompensation – the opposite of ‘not enough’ is actually ‘too much’ and the system in question will swing wildly from one extreme to the other until it eventually balances itself out.

Another example is the way that focus and feedback combine to create a spiral:

If you focus on noticing all of the things that are going wrong, you will notice them and as a result, you’ll feel worse. This will lead you to notice more of those things and will often reduce your performance, creating more negative signs. This is the start of a downward spiral.

If you instead focus on noticing all of the things that are going well, you will notice them and as a result, you’ll feel better. This will lead you to notice more of those things and will often pick up your performance, creating more positive signs. This leads into an upward spiral.

Notice how they’re both structured identically but are fuelled by different content. If you tend to spiral, good state control and a positive focus is a must if you want to stay on the up. This is often easier said than done. We all have bad days occasionally.

There are many things you can do to make it easier (a good NLP training will give you this info) or you can think a bit smarter and ask a better question instead.

Do you have to spiral at all? What if you could find a way to do something different instead? If you think that’s impossible then you’re stuck in the game, just like a gambler who continues to play “in order to win my money back“.

So just pretend you could stop and do something else? What is beyond the polarity?

I know that if you take the time to think this through, the answer you get will be both individual and interesting.

In Part 2, I’ll share an NLP technique that you can use to collapse polarities that are limiting you.

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When I meet new people and tell them that I do life coaching, every once in a while, someone voices the opinion that I get paid rather well just to have a ‘nice chat.’

They totally miss the point that during a coaching conversation, I’m actually bringing my full attention, focus and skill to bear. Additionally, most people I’ve met are reasonably uninformed about what those skills might be.

As someone who trains coaches, what bothers me most is the suggestion that reading a book on coaching is as good as having a life coach. It isn’t.

In my opinion, the whole ‘little life coach in your pocket’ turn of mind is sloppy thinking disguised as convenience and self-sufficiency. And it sells really well.

Some facts
Several years ago, I participated in an international survey about coaching. Coaching clients were also part of the survey and the findings revealed several key facts.

Firstly, life coaches were most valued as a sounding board for their clients. As human beings we’re designed to work best around people, in that many of our thought processes are focused purely on interaction. We talk, share new information and bounce ideas off each other.

It’s difficult to bounce ideas off yourself, as the whole point of the process is to reinterpret the same information through different filters, in comparison with a different set of reference experiences and feed back the result. It’s fairly obvious then that anyone who suggests that such perspective can be achieved through a simple step-by-step written process is kidding themselves.

Another key characteristic of an effective coach is that they make you aware of your own ‘blind spots.’ While you’ve probably heard the term, I define a blind spot as something that other people know about you that you don’t know about yourself. It takes a lot of awareness and skill in directing the ‘conversation’ to knowledge of the blind spot or sensitivity in delivering the news. You can’t do it yourself by the very definition of the term and a book will not change that.

A further important feature of the coaching process is that the ‘conversation’ should be provocative and challenging in a way that opens up new awareness of possibilities. To do this, one must spot and challenge faulty thinking, test perceived limits and coax, cajole and persuade them to greater awareness.

The top 1%
As a further convincer, let’s look at the really successful people – the top 1%. Life coaching is the distant cousin of sports coaching, so it’s time to talk about athletes. The cream of the crop are Olympic athletes and every last one of them has a coach.

The smart people at the high-performance end of the spectrum know that the extra insight, feedback and motivation that only a coach can provide is the difference between success and failure.

And they value that difference. How about you?

Books and goals
Coaching reveals the hidden things about our thinking or our perceptions. There are plenty of things we don’t know about ourselves. To take a mundane example, what does the back of your head look like? You can’t know by yourself. You need the help of a camera or mirrors.

Why has it all become so popular? What these ‘coaching’ books do is not life coaching. They deal with goal-getting, which is a process that can be done from a goal getting book. There is a big difference between coaching and goal-getting, which I’m sure you’re beginning to appreciate.

Who finds coaching useful?

There is always room for improvement. What is 100% anyway? The truth is that nobody knows. Goal-getting is like a journey. I’ve seen old signs made during the Second World War that say “Is your journey necessary?”

That wisdom applies here too. If you really want to achieve something, know yourself and know your limits. Then you can decide when you can help yourself and when you need help. I think coaching can get you there far more quickly and easily.

You decide.

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Let’s talk about one of the mainstays of self-help: the support group.

On the surface, it seems like a really good idea. You go and spend time with people who can understand your issues and relate easily to your experiences and your world-view. It works well for some.

However, the supposed strengths can actually be their greatest liability. Here’s how it often plays out:

You go and spend time with a lot of people who have the same problem as you. Sure, you’ll feel welcome and have a ‘sense of belonging.’ You will also be with the only people who definitely don’t have the answers you need, as they have the same filters and the same blind spots as you.

Think about it like this: A depressed person goes and spends their time with other depressed people. They talk about their problems and maybe even socialise together. They mutually reinforce each other’s opinion that the world is a depressing place. No surprise, no change and definitely no exit.

People with a problem don’t benefit from sameness, affirmation and a sense of belonging regarding their problem. Building those things through forming ‘communities of dysfunction’ can keep them stuck because if they change somehow, they’re no longer part of their social group! Deciding between having a problem or losing all your friends is not a great set of choices, I’m sure you will agree.

Strange though it may seem at first, they instead need discomfort, counter-examples and contrast in order to change because they need to be aware that something is wrong – and life can be better in ways that they value.

The first thing to remove is the choice to be stuck. This is something that Richard Bandler demonstrates repeatedly and which is part of NLP training. Bandler often creates change by colluding with the person’s comfortable and dysfunctional ‘reality’ – and then spoiling it somehow. Do this and then you can provide solutions, knowing that they’ve burned their bridges with regard to the problem. There is no going back.

So, what would a genuinely helpful support group be like? I suggest that the majority of the participants would be role-models who demonstrate positive function. And not necessarily those who ‘used to’ have the same issue, because coping is different from change.

So put a depressed person with relaxed and positive people and watch as they model their new social environment. Becoming ‘one of the crowd’ can be a massive unconscious influence for positive change, because the best hypnotic suggestions are non-verbal ones which are consistently demonstrated.

And you can do that just by being you.

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How much do you love what you do? If you were to take a moment and give it a grade out of 10, how would it score?

It probably won’t surprise you too much to hear that most people I’ve asked that question score below 7 out of 10.

Now, 10 out of 10 doesn’t indicate perfection – we all have our difficult moments. As a rule-of-thumb, I’d say that someone near the top of that scale would still do what they do, even if they didn’t get paid for it.

Knowing that, if most people score themselves below 7, then where is the love? Where is the passion we all have deep within ourselves?

In NLP, we talk about values – the motivations behind the things you enjoy doing that make them valuable to you as an individual. If your values are satisfied within an area of your life, you will be happy within that context.

That’s why values are so important within coaching – they can act as an indicator of where you should be looking if you want to be happy, successful and fulfilled.

What is it really like to love what you do? Take some time to watch the video below and you may get some ideas. Steve Jobs (Founder of Apple and Pixar) draws on three pivotal moments in his life to inspire Stanford graduates to pursue their dreams.

This video is inspirational to me, not just because of the stories he tells, but because it is tempered by a deep personal honesty:

“Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition – they somehow already know what you want to become”

When you know your values, you have a compass that always points towards success. All you need to do is follow it.

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In my observation of students of NLP over the years, certain patterns stand out in their development. One of the characteristics of moving beyond Practitioner level in NLP seems to be a transition from relying mainly on techniques to a focus on more tailored solutions.

For some people, this happens quickly as they grow beyond the rules-of-thumb that accompany the fundamentals and begin to form their own distinctions. Others reach this stage more slowly and require coaching or further training to open their awareness beyond the plateau of “process-oriented NLP”.

Part of the key is the development of greater flexibility through practice. You can use almost any facet of everyday life to fine-tune your skills. The trap here is to forget that NLP is just a way of looking at human process and interaction. The “everything is NLP” philosophy is a bit like looking at the world through a telescope and being so delighted with the vision it provides that you insist on looking at everything that way.

I remember an argument on one of the many NLP newsgroups where one person was insisting that the Enneagram, emotional intelligence and de Bono’s ‘six thinking hats’ were all NLP!

Another part of the transition beyond Practitioner is the realization that the ‘rules’ of NLP are just ‘rules of thumb’ after all. Experience and experimentation reveals where those rules can be selectively stretched or broken.

A further step is to usefully combine the existing processes to solve a specific problem or achieve an aim. I remember helping a friend to fix his car. At one point, he asked me to hand him a hammer. I looked through the tools several times, but there was no hammer among them. Testily, he reached out, grabbed a pipe wrench and said “Look. That’s a hammer”.

Part of flexibility is to know when a tool can be used for another purpose than the intended one. With all of that in mind, here’s a process I developed for a friend. I call it ‘constructive goal-getting’.

Constructive Goal-Getting

1. Think of a current obstacle in your life.
2. Imagine it vividly or describe it in detail.
3. Go forward on your timeline until you reach a time in the future where you have a solution. This may not be a conscious, detailed thing – you might experience it as a symbol or feeling.
4. Hold out your hands in front of you, apart and with your palms facing upwards.
5. Imagine the problem in one hand. Give it colour, weight, temperature, shape etc.
6. Imagine the ‘solution’ you found and put it in the other hand. Give it colour, weight, temperature, shape etc.
7. Slowly bring your hands together with the understanding that you do so only as quickly as your unconscious mind forms all of the necessary connecting steps between the problem and its solution.
8. Once your hands have come together, you have created those steps. Unroll them onto your timeline so the plan takes shape at a deep level.
9. What is the first step you have to take?
10. Do it now!

To those familiar with NLP, you will recognise a combination between timeline processes and the ‘visual squash’ technique. Those who have used this process will understand its power and simplicity.

My point in offering this is not just to give you another technique or process. It is to demonstrate how you can use your creativity to kick-start your flexibility. Some people don’t get this. Those are the ones who jam up discussion groups with endless requests for “a process to fix XYZ” instead of using their experience, awareness and flexibility to find a creative solution specific to that client.

Once you have moved beyond NLP Practitioner level, it’s time to give your deep consideration to achieving NLP mastery.

Enjoy the next step in your adventure!

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Someone recently asked me if the NLP Master Prac course I teach is “high performance”. I thought I’d share my response with you and let you in on a secret in the process.

But first, let’s tackle the “high performance” issue. Forget “high performance”.

To me, the Master prac is about two things – mastery and excellence.

Don’t get me wrong though. I think we can all agree that high performance is good. It’s just that I believe high performance is far from the pinnacle of excellence. I’d better explain what I mean.

High performance is what you get when you refine a process to near maximum efficiency or greatest effect. I agree that’s a worthy goal. So far so good.

However, the top limit on that, the highest performance, is defined by the nature of the process itself.

For example, you can build and fine-tune the best manual typewriter ever so it performs at its highest efficiency. Yet an average word-processor will out-perform even the best typewriter. This is why I’m asking you to focus beyond high performance. It only makes sense.

And high performance is generally about doing the best you can within the existing system. That’s why I focus on mastery. The journey from basic learning to mastery is about moving from learning the rules, to knowing how to bend and break the rules and far beyond – knowing when the rules simply don’t exist.

The most apparent evidence for this is in entrepreneurial behaviour. Top entrepreneurs are rule breakers and rule re-definers. They don’t just break their toys – they create something radically better from the pieces. Something revolutionary.

To me, that is mastery.

The Master Prac is also about excellence – and excellence is a personal quality. so you must get the learning that you personally need. How?

I’m going to let you in on a secret about our NLP Master Prac that few people are aware of.

The Master Prac syllabus allows us greater flexibility to focus the course on the areas of application that are most important to each of you. Naturally, we do this within the scope of the skills, techniques and awareness-enhancing exercises that make our NLP Master Prac such a high-level training. So participants bring their wish-lists – and finish the course feeling completely satisfied.

We ask participants to bring their NLP wish-lists. What would be on yours?

Would you like to be able to say this afterwards?

“Absolutely awesome! My ‘wish list’ goals were attained within the first 3 days. As the fundamentals of NLP were covered we moved into the mastery of NLP and the group started to create new patterns. I really felt as if I was in a pioneering development group. All of the trainers and assistants are friendly, good-humoured, down-to-earth and highly skilled. This course went way beyond what I expected. Superb value.” – Colin G Smith, NLP Master Practitioner

Go here if you want more proof.

What would you prefer now : high performance or mastery?

There is a further step beyond that level of mastery too. Let me know what you think that is in your comments on this blog.

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