A Practical Guide to NLP for Work E-Book

Dianne Lowther

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 210

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Neurolinguistic Programming is about helping you to identify and develop the patterns of thought and behaviour which are most beneficial to you. Introducing NLP for Work teaches you how to build a successful rapport with your colleagues, enabling you to deal effectively with any problems and master any situation.

Leseprobe

First Published in the UK in 2012by Icon Books Ltd,Omnibus Business Centre,39–41 North Road,London N7 9DPemail: [email protected]

This electronic edition published in the UK in 2012 by Icon Books Ltd

ISBN: 978-1-84831-381-1 (ePub format)ISBN: 978-1-84831-382-8 (Adobe ebook format)

Printed edition sold in the UK, Europe,South Africa and Asiaby Faber & Faber Ltd,Bloomsbury House,74–77 Great Russell Street,London WC1B 3DAor their agents

Printed edition distributed in the UK, Europe,South Africa and Asiaby TBS Ltd,TBS Distribution Centre,Colchester Road,Frating Green,Colchester CO7 7DW

Printed edition published in Australia in 2012by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Printed edition distributed in Canadaby Penguin Books Canada,90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3

Printed edition published in the USA in 2012by Icon BooksInquiries to: Icon Books Ltd,Omnibus Business Centre,39–41 North Road,London N7 9DP, UK

Printed edition distributed to the trade in the USAby Consortium Book Salesand DistributionThe Keg House, 34 ThirteenthAvenue NE, Suite 101,Minneapolis, MN 55413-1007

Text copyright © 2012 Dianne Lowther

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Avenir by Marie Doherty

About the author

Dianne Lowther first started learning NLP in 1992 after graduating in Psychology. Since then she has delivered or co-delivered almost 1,000 days of NLP training. Dianne qualified as a Master Trainer of NLP in 2009 and is the author of two self-study programmes, ‘Leadership through Everyday Conversation’ and ‘Use Your NLP’.

Applications of NLP in the workplace have always been Dianne’s principal focus. Since forming her company Brilliant Minds in 1996 she has become a sought-after consultant and coach, working with organizations in a variety of sectors including technology, finance, engineering and leisure. At the 2009 National Training Awards, Brilliant Minds won a Welsh Training Award for Partnership and Collaboration with Schaeffler (UK) Ltd on an NLP Practitioner programme for the leadership team that enabled significant improvement in business results.

Author’s note

It’s important to note that there are many frequently used stories, anecdotes and metaphors employed in NLP. Where I know the source I will be sure to reference it, but my apologies to the originators of any material if I have overlooked them here.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

About the author

Author’s note

Introduction

1. The NLP language and communication model

2. The presuppositions of NLP

3. Outcome thinking

4. Rapport, pacing and leading

5. Rep systems

6. Perceptual positions

7. Submodalities

8. Strategies

9. Modelling

10. Language

A final word

Resources

Index

Introduction

What is NLP?

Have you noticed that people are different? Of course you have. Have you ever wondered how those differences are created? I can explain. If you begin with the fact that most of us have five senses and yet there is far more information available to those senses than we could possibly process – or would want to – then you have the key.

Given that our senses pick up more information than we can actually use, a filtering process must be going on in order to feed our conscious awareness with a manageable amount of data. Therefore each of us is aware of only a tiny proportion of what is going on at any one time. In effect, we all create our own highly subjective ‘map of the world’ inside our own minds. Small wonder then, that two people can emerge from an hour-long meeting with totally different views about what has been agreed or decided!

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is built upon a systematic approach to understanding this filtering process, the nature of the filters – which may include beliefs, values, past experiences and languages – and the extent to which the resulting map of the world is effective.

An effective map of the world is one that supports the achievement of your goals. An ineffective part of the map is one that gets in the way of the achievement of the same goals.

NLP is also concerned with how an ineffective part of your map of the world can be adjusted to become effective. Hence NLP has generated many techniques for systematically changing behaviour, beliefs, habits, negative emotions and so on. It has also given us many equally useful techniques for eliciting information about maps of the world and the ways in which they operate, effectively or ineffectively. And ultimately, all maps of the world are effective at producing results – it’s just a question of whether or not they were the results you wanted!

NLP is mostly concerned with structure rather than content. That means we’re interested in the way that people think and act rather than what they’re thinking or doing. This is important because there are observable patterns in the way that people think and behave. When we become familiar with the patterns we can plan our approach to take account of them.

The ‘official’ Society of NLP definition of NLP is that it is ‘the study of the structure of subjective experience’.

The origins of NLP

NLP was developed in the 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder at the University of Santa Cruz in California. Initially, Bandler and Grinder collaborated on a project to identify the structure of influential language used by some of the great psychotherapists of the day. That study yielded not only some groundbreaking insights into the way that language can change perceptions, but also a new methodology – modelling – that could be used to distil the essence of the skills of any person. (Modelling is described in more detail in chapter 9.)

There are plenty of books available that describe the early stages of the development of NLP. My purpose here is to give you an experience of the practical uses of NLP in a 21st-century workplace, so rather than a history lesson, let me give you some food for thought.

If you were able to figure out the patterns in the way that the people around you behave or respond, and then accurately predict the best way to influence each person, what would that make possible for you?

And if you knew how to create the conditions so that you could work effectively and easily every day, what would that make possible for you?

Is it worth a few hours of your time to read this book and find out?

What’s in a name?

With a name like neuro-linguistic programming, it’s not surprising that most people prefer to use the abbreviation NLP. However, the full name gives us clues to what this subject is about:

Neuro: concerning the brain and the nervous system

Linguistic: concerning language

Programming: mmm, this is where a lot of people get a bit uncomfortable. When you see ‘brain’ and ‘programming’ in the same sentence, what do you think about? Brain-washing? Mind control? I think I’d better explain.

When we talk about programming in NLP, it refers to programmes of behaviour. Habits.

What did you do between the time when your alarm clock went off this morning and leaving the house to go to work? The same as every other morning after the alarm clock goes off?

The sequence of activities that you go through every morning in getting ready to go to work can be thought of as a programme. Unless you have small children at home (in which case, anything might happen!) then it’s likely that you do the same things in the same order every morning. It’s a programme that gets you from lying in bed to standing at the front door, bag in hand, ready to go to work. And like anything you can do well, you do it without thinking about it very much.

But think about it now. How good is that programme? Does it result in you standing at the front door, suitably dressed, having eaten a nutritious breakfast, well rested from a good night’s sleep and feeling upbeat, positive and ready for your day at work? Or not?

If you’re at the front door, still half asleep, not having had any breakfast, badly dressed and feeling stressed, then I suggest that this programme could be improved. Wouldn’t you agree?

And even if you’re facing the day in the best possible frame of mind but it has taken four hours to get ready, I might still suggest that the programme could be improved.

So a programme is a habit. A sequence of actions that we can do so well we don’t have to think about it to do it. Consider some of the things you do well; is it true that you do them completely instinctively, without any conscious thought?

Anything you can do really well, you can do without thinking about.

Without NLP, changing habits is a laborious business. Remembering to do something different, something that doesn’t really come naturally, is hard. Finding the motivation to keep doing it until it becomes instinctive is even harder. So if I tell you that NLP gives us the possibility to ‘reprogramme’ our behaviour with a one-off intervention, would you be interested to know more?

Or would you be a bit sceptical? It’s good to be sceptical. I hope that you won’t take my word about the information and techniques in this book. I hope you’ll experiment with them and find out for yourself. I want you to make your own mind up about how useful NLP can be for you at work.

NLP for work

NLP has applications in lots of fields. In the working environment, I would list four main areas where NLP is useful, although, of course, this is not exhaustive. Once you start to use NLP, you can discover even more ways to apply it to your own work.

Self-management: As organizations get ‘flatter’, that is, they have fewer levels of management in the hierarchical structure, more managers have more direct reports and hence less time for each one. As organizations grow, more people work from home or on a different site from colleagues, their manager or their team members and so the amount of input from managers reduces even more. To be effective, everyone must be self-managing to some extent.

NLP techniques and principles can support activities such as goal-setting, self-motivation, overcoming nervousness before an important event, conquering mental blocks, improving decision-making techniques and managing self-development.

Communication: This is probably the biggest challenge in any organization, and the size of the challenge increases the larger the organization is. In the face of increasingly ‘flat’ company structures, greater reliance on technology and the growing support for diversity in the workforce, effective communication is getting harder, and yet is also becoming more important than ever.

NLP can be applied to work out effective communication strategies for different individuals and groups. By using NLP models and questioning systems we can find out a lot about how others think and how best to structure communications to achieve the desired goal.

Learning and developing new skills: The pace of life and business is increasing. In the race for market share, most companies have to be highly flexible and adaptable in order to succeed. This means that the workforce must be highly flexible and adaptable too. People need to be able to learn new skills efficiently, manage change enthusiastically and constantly seek out new sources of competitive advantage.

NLP can be used effectively by organizations to ‘model’ the key skills demonstrated by the organization’s top performers and then teach those skills to other workers. Modelling a skill means finding out not just what those top performers do, but also the way they do it.

Similarly, for individuals, NLP can help you to formulate a reliable strategy for your own development and learn how to model skills from colleagues, specialists or even public figures.

Dealing with ‘emotional baggage’: There are an increasing number of people in the workforce who have experienced redundancy, a takeover, relocation, a merger or some kind of violence or harassment at work. Even the best organizations do not always succeed in helping people come through these kinds of experiences with a positive attitude. At worst, a whole organization may end up demoralized and unproductive through a badly managed merger or change programme. Reluctant though we may be to admit it, many people carry these bad experiences with them and this can hinder them from achieving their full potential.

NLP offers some of the best and quickest techniques for acknowledging the personal significance of these experiences and shaking off the negative consequences such as mistrust of employers, anger and distress, low morale, lack of motivation and loss of self-worth. Having moved through the negative effects of the events, the individual is then free to consider the value of what they have learned and apply it constructively in the future.

Overall, NLP offers a structured, systematic approach and reliable, effective techniques for dealing with the most challenging aspects of managing people – and ‘people’ includes yourself.

1. The NLP language and communication model

I want to begin by looking at a diagram.

This diagram shows the ‘NLP language and communication model’. This is a representation of how we process information via our senses and then respond to what we perceive.

Let’s start in the top left of the diagram with information coming in from the outside world and into your senses. On the diagram it looks as if it’s coming in at eye level but it is intended to represent all of your senses. The function of your senses is to translate external information into neurological impulses so that your brain can make sense of them. So, for example, your eyes transform different wavelengths of light into different kinds of neural signals so that your brain then creates a pattern of information on the visual cortex at the back of your brain. Each of our senses translates external information into neurological impulses and that’s the first level of transformation that happens.

The result of this is the first level of representation, what John Grinder calls ‘first access’. You’ll see on the diagram that it’s also labelled with the initials V A K O G. This stands for visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory – our five senses. One thing it’s important to realize at this stage is that the kinaesthetic here is purely sensory information, not emotional information. We don’t detect our emotional feelings in the outside world, we only detect things like texture and temperature and weight, so it’s purely sensory kinaesthetics at first access.

What we’ve got here is a first-level representation of reality that is purely sensory. Notice that there are no words at first access. This is the level of perception that a very small child would have before they learn language. But, of course, what makes us human, what makes us different from other species, is that we do have language, and our ability to ‘make sense’ of things using language is really what sets us apart.

Deletion, distortion and generalization

The second stage of transformation is when that sensory information is labelled with words and it becomes our internal reality. Referring back to the diagram of the NLP language and communication model, you will see the second phase where the sensory information goes through the linguistic filters. Below the ‘Filters’ heading is a short list of what the filters do: they delete, distort and generalize. Below that is the list of what the filters are. There are lots of different kinds of filters and the list on the diagram is a representative one: it’s not completely exhaustive but it will cover most of the things that we need to talk about. So I’m going to come back and deal with that in a bit more detail, but first let’s talk about the idea of deletion, distortion and generalization, because this is what language does.

When we talk about deletion, it’s not like you would delete a file from your PC and then it’s gone. When we refer to deletion in terms of language it’s more accurate to think about it as what we are not paying attention to.

Deletion can also happen at sensory level. For example, if you live near a train station or an airport, you probably find that after a while, you no longer notice the sounds coming from the trains or the aeroplanes, but if someone comes to visit they really notice it. ‘How do you live with the noise?’ they cry and you say, ‘What noise?’ because it’s just disappeared from your conscious awareness. In the same way, we delete things from language that we think we don’t need to talk about. Sometimes that’s useful, sometimes it can lead to misunderstanding.

The same thing is true of distortions. Again, distortions can happen at a sensory level – things like optical illusions – but also distortions can happen in language because sometimes we have a tendency to want to make things fit with our reality. So we might slightly distort the way something is to make it fit in with our preconceived ideas. Then, when we talk about it, we talk about it as if it is the way we’d like it to be rather than acknowledging that in some ways it’s slightly different. That’s a distortion of the information we’re getting from the outside world.

Generalization is the third thing that the filters do. As it sounds, that means making a principle or taking a general idea on the basis of a small amount of information.

When we generalize, we have one or two experiences, we make sense of those, and on that basis, we say, ‘This must be true,’ in a whole variety of different situations. We’re taking information from one context and assuming that it would be true in a lot more. To do this is necessary because if you couldn’t generalize, every time you changed your car you’d have to learn how to drive all over again. Every time you went to a different office, you’d have to learn how to open the door! However, generalization is also at the heart of all bias and prejudice, so it’s not always a useful process.

So deletion, distortion and generalization have their uses and clearly that’s why they have evolved as part of the way we interact with the world, but they also can cause problems if we’re not aware of what we’re doing.

When the information has come in from the outside world, it goes through two stages of transformation: the first one is at a sensory level and the second level is at a linguistic level where we label our experience, put words to it and literally make sense out of it. The end result of this is what we call our internal representation of reality.

Internal representation, conscious and unconscious

Your internal representation of the world has two elements to it: there’s a conscious part and there’s an unconscious part. Look again at the diagram on here and see how this is represented. At the top, the conscious area, we’ve got V A K O G – visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory – again to represent the sensory information that we’re consciously aware of. We’ve also got an added element now, which is our conscious thought process. In other words, it’s what we’re saying to ourselves.

Do you talk to yourself? Some people think that they don’t talk to themselves and some people know that they do and are a little embarrassed to admit it. So let me tell you that if you talk to yourself, inside your own head, that’s completely normal. Some people even talk to themselves out loud and that’s actually not as abnormal as you might think!

Obviously it’s a hard thing to measure but informal research suggests that most people talk to themselves more than half the time that they’re awake. In fact, the only time that we switch off that ‘running commentary’ inside our heads is when we’re completely engrossed in doing something. That might be just watching a movie, it might be getting engrossed in a piece of work or it might be playing a sport. You’ve probably heard athletes talk about ‘getting in the zone’ which is when they stop thinking about what they’re doing and just do it. So there are times when we switch off that commentary but often, when we’re just going about doing our daily routines, we chat to ourselves inside.

It can be an interesting experience to start paying attention to what you’re saying to yourself because some of us are not quite as polite in talking to ourselves as we might be talking to other people!

What we say to ourselves, alongside all the sensory information, is a very important part of our conscious thinking. That conscious thinking interacts with the other part, which is the representation of reality that’s outside of conscious awareness. The experts say that everything that happens to us, every thought that we have, every bit of information that we come across is recorded somewhere in the deep recesses of our brain. Some of that information we can get out again very easily and some of it is more difficult to access. But in terms of relative size, the unconscious part of your mind is very much bigger than the conscious part. You can really only do one thing at a time consciously but always in the background, unconsciously, you’re doing lots of other things. That’s why sometimes you might go to bed wondering about how to tackle a particular situation in your job and the next morning, thinking that you haven’t really moved on very much, you suddenly realize that you’ve got the answer to the problem because, while you were asleep, the unconscious part of your mind was still working on the ideas.

Before you go to sleep tonight, set the unconscious part of your mind a task to do. It might be a problem to solve, an idea to create or a decision to make. Explain the task to yourself in the same way as you would pass on a task to a colleague. Notice what has happened when you wake up tomorrow.

You have probably already realized that there’s a lot going on outside of conscious awareness. The unconscious part of your mind is also the storage place for everything that you know.

If I was to ask you for your phone number, even though you weren’t thinking about it until I asked, you would be able to answer me immediately because the information comes out of your unconscious storage and into conscious awareness instantly. You can tell me what the number is, and then it will leave your conscious thoughts again.

Thinking about the relative sizes of the conscious and unconscious part so your mind, the metaphor that I like the most is this:

Imagine you are standing in the middle of a large, round theatre, in complete darkness but with a very powerful pencil-beam torch in your hand. Think about how much of the theatre you could light up. It would only be a very small amount at a time. You could light up most of the theatre … but not all at once.

That’s what your conscious awareness is like in relation to your unconscious mind, because we can shine the light on a little tiny bit of information, and we can become consciously aware of a small piece in a given moment but, in order to be aware of something else, we have to let go of the first bit of information we were thinking of. There’s a huge amount of information available at the unconscious level.

Thinking, feeling and physiology

We’ve looked at your internal representation of the world in terms of the sensory information and the conscious thought process. Let’s have a look at how that interacts with the rest of your emotional experience and your body.

Once again, we need to refer back to the diagram of the NLP language and communication model on here. Look at the right-hand side of the diagram. You’ll see that there is a connection between what you think and how you feel and then the physiological experience, lower down the diagram. You may also notice that there is a ‘back door’ route that goes from first access on the far side straight round to physiology. This represents reflex actions – the things that you can’t do anything about, whereby as soon as you see or hear a certain thing, you react physically.