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- Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Using the amazingly effective tools of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) Mindworks shows you how to unlock the resources, abilities and creativity that you already have in order to accomplish whatever you want to do and take control of your life.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008
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Praise forMindworks
I have followed Anné Linden’s work with interest for more than twenty years now and know her as a skilled and experienced NLP trainer. I’m delighted that she has at last found a way to share her knowledge and thinking with a wider audience. If you are not yet familiar with NLP then Mindworks is a gentle yet thorough introduction covering everything that you would wish to know now. Anné writes clearly and her experience shows through.
Julian Russell, Senior Executive Coach, PPD Consulting Ltd
Anné Linden is a master teacher, a model of excellence, and her writing is wonderfully simple and crystal clear, offering readers empowering principles of transformation. She makes NLP very accessible, and I am most happy and eager to highly recommend her book to all my students, colleagues, and friends. We certainly will carry her book in our Learning Alliance bookstore!
Rev. Joyce Liechenstein, Ph.D. Associate Director, One Spirit Learning Alliance and One Spirit Interfaith Seminary, New York City, www.joyceliechenstein.com
I welcome this re-issue of Anné Linden’s Mindworks which is written as an enthusiastic, conversational and personal guide to experiencing NLP and discovering more about yourself.
She utilises both her actor’s and teacher’s skills in offering the reader many rich choices of practical exercises, suggestions, questions, stories, metaphors and even scripted scenarios to bring NLP vividly to life.
Its a well-contructed and interesting introduction to NLP and, importantly too, there is an emphasis on exploring and learning NLP in a framework of personal integrity and wisdom. The writer’s thirty years of experience with NLP certainly shines through with an undiminishedsincerity, creativity and passion.
A great book for people, new to NLP, who are curious about NLP as a pathway to self-development and who enjoy colourful and lively real-life examples of how it works—and who also like to be warmly encouraged to try it out for themselves!
Judith Lowe, PPD Learning, London
This is a beautiful book. Not only is it full of delightful insights. It is written in the most elegant absorbing way. Only someone who has mastered a topic can write with such fluency and style. Anné Linden is undoubtedly one such master. Mindworks is a delight to read if only for the absorbing style with which it is written. For me this is what NLP Is all about … being an example of excellence and this book is most certainly that.
Sue Knight, Author of NLP at Work, International Consultant, Trainer and Coach. www.sueknight.co.uk
Often, when I try to explain the intricacies of NLP to others who are not psychologically-inclined, I get one of two responses. One response is the “eyes glazing over” expression of the person who finds my explanation far too complicated. The other response is the enthusiasm of a novice who sees in NLP a path toward personal growth. Both people need an easy-to-understand approach to NLP that shows them how to use NLP for superb communication, accessing resourceful states, getting results, turning failure into feedback, and having more choice and flexibility in everyday situations. Mindworks by Anné Linden (with Kathrin Perutz) is the answer.
Mindworks is an “owner’s manual for the mind” that allows readers to “make maximum use of the strengths and resources you already have.” The book is divided into seven sections, each presenting a basic NLP presupposition:
The meaning of your communication is the response you get. This section covers how to create quality communication in interpersonal relationships: rapport, observation skills, calibration, representational systems and how they are expressed (verbally and non-verbally), uptime and downtime, sameness and differences, and pacing and leading.You have all the resources you need. This section tells readers how to access their resources and develop their strengths and talents. The NLP tools are submodalities, anchoring, future conditioning, and body language. Success is the ability to achieve intended results. Here, the book delves into goal-setting, values, outcomes, motivation, ecological considerations, and strategies.You can turn failure into feedback. This section is a philosophical guide to understanding how to reframe failure—to discover the learnings, the see the new opportunities presented by failure, and to recognize that good that exists, alongside, or in spite of, the bad.The map is not the territory. In this exploration of language patterns, Linden teaches the Meta Model—a method of questioning that facilitates specificity and understanding of meaning.There is a positive intention behind every behavior. At this point, the text addresses our unconscious behaviors and how to manage them with an understanding of “parts”, positive intentions, and reframing.There are always more choices. Flexibility is the topic. Linden presents tools for change: perceptual shifts and pattern interrupts.ConclusionMindworks makes NLP palatable for the non-practitioner—someone who simply wants to know how to use NLP in daily life. Linden weaves the instruction into an upbeat, conversational delivery, with sample dialog, examples, and metaphors. Mindworks is a first-rate beginner’s guide to NLP.
Judith E. Pearson, Ph.D. is a Licensed Professional Counselor, certified hypnotherapist, and certified NLP trainer, with a private practice in Springfield, Virginia. She has recently published The Weight, Hypnotherapy and You Weight Reduction Program: An NLP and Hypnotherapy Practitioner’s Manual. Her website is www.engagethepower.com.
Mindworks
An Introduction to NLP
Anné Linden
with Kathrin Perutz
Contents
Title Page
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Turning on the Magic
PART ONE
The Meaning Of Your Communication Is The Response You Get
1 Saying What You Mean
2 Getting the Message Out: Other-Orientation and Rapport
3 Directing Consciousness: Uptime
4 Calibration
5 Representational Systems
6 Expressions of Representational Systems: Sensory Language
7 Expressions of Representational Systems: Eye Movements
8 Noticing Sameness or Difference
9 Backtracking
10 Pacing and Leading
11 Communication Is Flexibility
COMMUNICATION RECAP
Frog Paradise
PART TWO
You Have All The Resources You Need
12 Hidden Treasures
13 Submodalities
14 Labeling Resources
15 Anchoring
16 Future Conditioning
17 Physiology
RESOURCES RECAP
Someland
PART THREE
Success Is The Ability To Achieve Intended Results
18 Asking Questions
19 Defining an Outcome
20 Goal or Outcome?
21 The Well-Formed Outcome
22 The Outcome Stated in Positives
23 The Outcome Under Your Control
24 The Specific Outcome
25 Evidence of the Outcome’s Success
26 The Ecological Outcome
27 The As If Frame
28 Implementing the Plan: Resources
29 Implementing the Plan: Strategy
The Chinese Merchant
PART FOUR
You Can Turn Failure Into Feedback
30 What Is Failure? What Is Feedback?
31 Back from the Future: Learning from Failure
32 Dissociation
33 Chunking
FAILURE-TO-FEEDBACK RECAP
The Little Kitten
PART FIVE
The Map Is Not The Territory
34 Patterns of Language
35 Linguistic Patterns
36 Language Patterns: The Metamodel
METAMODEL RECAP
The Monk’s Dialogue
PART SIX
There Is A Positive Intention Behind Every Behavior
37 Behavior
38 Parts
39 Positive Intention
40 Reframing
41 Communicating with Your Unconscious
INNER REFRAME
The Prince’s Wife
PART SEVEN
There Are Always More Choices
42 Defining Choices
43 Your Model of the World
44 Non-Polar Thinking
45 Shifting Perspectives
46 Dissolving Negative Emotions
47 Pop-It!
Jake O’Shaunessey
Copyright
Preface
MINDWORKS is an unusual self-help book in that it tells you what you already know. The main point of reading it isn’t so much to get new information, as to learn how to use the information you already have but don’t know about or have access to.
This book is for and about you. Its aim is to help you achieve your goals, whatever they are—to open up your particular choices.
Don’t just read this book, use it! The skills outlined here are of no use at all unless you practice them. These are not intellectual propositions; this is not about intellectual solutions. Even if you are accustomed to solving problems through logic and reasoning, suspend that way of thinking for the space of this book. Let it work its magic. Let it work your magic.
When you do the exercises—actually do them instead of thinking about them—you effect the changes, conscious and unconscious, that lead to choice.
Read the book through systematically, from beginning to end, and then go back and concentrate on a particular section or skill or technique. Bring your own abilities, resources, fears, and habits to this book. Make it your own, and at the end you will discover that your mind is the most interesting place you know.
Acknowledgments
I WISH TO acknowledge with appreciation and respect Richard Bandler and John Grinder, the creators of Neuro Linguistic Programming, who were my original teachers. This book is based on their work. Some of the exercises and processes were developed from their training sessions. I especially want to express my deep appreciation to the memory of Milton H. Erickson, one of the most influential “ancestors” of NLP, with whom I had the privilege to study and whose wisdom continues to inform and energize my life and my work. I also want to recognize Robert Dilts from whom the idea of shifting perspectives came. I thank my dear friends Murray Spalding, who helped give birth to this book; Susan James, whose ongoing support and enthusiasm has always sustained and encouraged me; and Joanne Fabris, who brought me together with Kathy, without whom this book would not have been written. Last, many thanks to Jane Dystel, who helped make this book a reality.
Introduction: Turning on the Magic
EVERYONE HAS DREAMS, big and little dreams, impossible dreams, and close-at-hand ones. Dreams of adventure, love, and success of every kind: daring to stand up to someone who’s always had a hold on you, cooking an unforgettable meal, writing a book, winning the gold, wearing purple, learning French, making responsible choices, taking control of your life.
Make a picture in your mind of a dream you have, something you want to accomplish, a promise made to yourself, a goal you hope to reach. Make that picture small and dark and far away. Hold it in your mind’s eye for a few seconds. Notice the feelings you have. Let it go.
Now make the picture big and bright and bring it closer to you. See it projected on your mental inner screen. Notice the feelings you have. Let it go.
Which way of representing your dream makes you feel more motivated to go after it? Which of the images makes you believe more strongly in the possibility of achieving it?
Your brain is a magic place. It may take a while before you can turn on the sights and sounds and feelings of experience with the ease of adjusting your TV, but it will come much more quickly than you now think possible.
All of us are making pictures inside our heads and playing tapes and talking to ourselves; it’s the way our brains represent experience. When you think about something that has happened, something that might happen, or something you want to happen, you see and hear and feel it through your senses. This is the way we think, though most of the time we’re unaware of how we do it.
In order to achieve our goals, resolve problems, or sort out our values, we have to be able to get in touch with the part of ourselves that controls most of what we do: walking, talking, breathing, moving, and all the hundreds of automatic behaviors that get us through the course of a day. I’m talking about the unconscious mind.
To make changes in our lives, we need to access this part of ourselves, to open up the connections between our conscious and unconscious thoughts.
Much has been written about communication, particularly about the difficulties in communicating across gaps of age, gender, expectations, ethnicity, or education. Interpersonal communication—communication between people, between yourself and someone else—is extremely important for our daily social interactions. You have to make sure that the message you’re trying to send is received and understood. You also have to ensure that you understand what someone else is trying to tell you. In many jobs, being able to communicate with others is crucial, and certainly few if any relationships can survive without it.
But at least as important as the ability to communicate clearly with others is the ability to communicate with yourself. Intrapersonal communication means doing within yourself what you do to establish understanding and rapport with others: listening, paying close attention, and creating an atmosphere of trust and safety.
Unless you trust yourself, you can’t communicate. And only by communicating with yourself can you discover the way you think. Then you can change your way of thinking to resolve problems and obstacles, and to break out of unprofitable or limiting habits and patterns.
You start this process of change by discovering what’s already there, the resources and abilities you possess, the things you do to motivate yourself or hold yourself back. You start by thinking out loud.
How do you represent your goals or dreams to yourself? Can you actually picture them? If you can’t see your dream out in front of you, how will you follow it? If you don’t know what you’re looking for, how will you know when you’ve found it?
Once you’ve imagined (literally, “made an image of”) what you hope to accomplish or where you’re going, you are already that much closer to fulfillment. In all probability that’s what you’re doing now. That’s what we all do, whether or not we’re aware of it. If you’re lucky, you’re already making a big bright colorful picture of whatever you want to achieve, even without knowing it. Or you’re talking to yourself, cheering yourself on with “You can do it!” and other words of encouragement, like the Little Engine That Could.
But maybe you’re doing the opposite—again, whether or not you’re aware of it. Maybe you’re telling yourself “I’ll never be able to do this” or “I’m stupid” or “Everyone else is better than I am.” You may have been telling yourself this so often you’ve come to believe it.
Try this: Take the message you send yourself that keeps you from accomplishing the great or small things you hope to do, and play it over in your mind. Repeat the words you tell yourself: “I’ll never finish that” or “I’m not smart enough” or whatever you say.
Turn that message down until it’s very quiet, and make it come from very far away.
Now turn up the volume. Make the message loud and close.
Put circus music underneath it.
What happens?
The words remain the same, but the meaning will alter. How you do or think or feel something determines its impact. You can change how you feel by changing how you think. You can take conscious control over your unconscious behavior.
Within your brain right now are thousands of choices you might not have a clue about. You didn’t notice all the alternatives that have been available to you. Maybe you’ve taken a backseat, until now, and let yourself be driven along the road or tracks of your life.
It’s time to take control. By learning how to direct your mind, you can do just about anything: change direction, go backward or forward, accomplish what you dream of, resolve difficulties, alter your habits, get on a new track. You can be in charge, in the driver’s seat, the captain of your ship.
This doesn’t mean you can always get what you want when you want it. But it does mean you have choices about how you think and feel. It means you can make your brain actively work for you instead of leaving it on automatic pilot.
If you can pinpoint what, specifically, you need to change and have the tools at hand to change it, the results can be magical. In an instant you can go from a feeling of limits to a feeling of strength and freedom, as the new associations flow together like quicksilver.
Each of us is unique. We experience the world in our own way. We each have our own content, the result of our personal histories of sensations, people, events, behavior, and emotions. Yet we’re able to communicate to and with another person. How do we do that? How can I be sure that if I say something is beautiful you will know what I mean? Or what about love? Each person conjures up different images and associations when we hear the word love, and yet each of us expects to be understood when we say, “I love you.”
Interpersonal communication is the way we connect with each other. It’s what’s going on between you and me across this page. I’m bouncing my thoughts off you; you react or respond with your own thoughts and sensations. Maybe you’re arguing with me in your mind; or you’re forming a picture of what this book is about or how it will affect you.
Mindworks is an owner’s manual for the mind. It will show you a number of techniques, all very simple, for allowing you to make maximum use of the strengths and resources you already have.
If you have a flashlight but no batteries, you won’t find your way in the dark. If you have batteries but don’t know the correct way to insert them, you still won’t have any illumination. To shine the light along your path, you’ll need your flashlight, batteries, and a few instructions. This book provides the instructions. You already have the rest.
Mindworks is based on the principles of Neuro Linguistic Programming, or NLP. It’s what I have been teaching and practicing for close to twenty years, as founder and director of the New York Training Institute for NLP. Now I am bringing the principles and techniques of this extraordinary methodology directly to you, to each reader of this book. Here are die skills or tools to open up your own choices, within the contents and contexts of your own lives.
NLP was founded in the mid 1970s by Richard Bandler and John Grinder (my teachers and colleagues) and incorporates the work of many seminal thinkers in the fields of linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, among others. Essentially, NLP offers practical techniques for changing behavior by means of clear communication, both with ourselves and others. As the name implies (neuro refers to the brain, linguistic to language, programming to habitual patterns of behavior, like thought, created by the impact of language on the brain), NLP shows us how to “reprogram” ourselves. This means first bringing to consciousness the patterns and behaviors that we’re constantly engaged in without being aware of them. Then we can challenge the assumptions we hold and don’t think about, access the resources we don’t even know we have, and finally, by “changing” our minds, we can alter our behavior, thoughts, and feelings.
NLP is concerned with how our minds work—the patterns we use to organize information, the ways we motivate (or inhibit) ourselves—how we can modify automatic patterns of response to allow new choices, new behaviors, new ways of thinking and feeling. Because NLP concentrates on immediate trouble spots instead of raking over the past, the results are quick, sometimes immediate.
NLP is expressed through specific mental tools that we’ll be discussing throughout this book, tools for change so effective and instantaneous they seem like magic. The tools come in the form of simple instructions, often couched as questions, about how to control the workings of your mind.
We’ve all experienced some of the magic: a mind that can summon up the blue edging on a coat in the long-ago past or remember a melody heard only once; a mind that can step into the future, invent poems, solve mathematical problems, fall in love, understand another person’s need. Our minds are more complicated than any other thing in the universe, and yet we can adjust them, fine-tune them, alter their patterns with something as simple as a pointed question.
Mindworks is a user’s guide, providing instructions on how to make these tools and techniques work. The names of some of these skills may be unfamiliar to you, though you’ll recognize most of them as familiar processes. Like the character in Molière’s play who discovers that what he’s been speaking all his life is prose, you will discover that you’ve been doing NLP in some form or other all along.
Mindworks is divided into seven parts, each representing one of the fundamental principles of NLP, which we refer to as presuppositions. In linguistic terms, a presupposition is everything you must assume to be true in order for the statement to make sense. If I say, “The cat jumped from the table,” the presupposition behind my statement is that the cat was on the table. If I say, “Close the window,” that presupposes the window was open.
The basic NLP presuppositions outline what we assume to be true, and the specific skills and techniques follow from that. In using this book, you’ll discover it’s most effective if you accept the presuppositions. You don’t have to believe them (at least not yet; I’m trusting that you’ll believe them by the time you come to the end), but they’ll have the greatest effect if you act as if they were true. (“As if” is an NLP skill we use in formulating outcomes.) Act as if the presuppositions are true, and you’ll discover how this affects your thinking, your attitudes to others and yourself.
These are the presuppositions in the order we’ll be discussing them:
1. The meaning of your communication is the response you get
2. You have all the resources you need
3. Success is the ability to achieve intended results
4. You can turn failure into feedback
5. The map is not the territory
6. There is a positive intention behind every behavior
7. There are always more choices
Learning NLP is, for many people, a new way of coming to terms with what you already know. It’s a guide to your own programs, a systematic way of making use of your resources, of harnessing your abilitiesand strengths, and being able to communicate freely and clearly to yourself and others. If you’d like more information about any of the patterns, skills, or concepts presented in this book, please contact Anné Linden, 20 Hawksview Lane, Accord, NY 12404, or visit www.nlpcenter.com.
PART ONE
THE MEANING OF YOUR COMMUNICATION IS THE RESPONSE YOU GET
CHAPTER 1
Saying What You Mean
“You should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on. “I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least—at least I mean what I say.”
—Lewis CarrollAlice in Wonderland
DOYOU KNOW what you’re saying?
Of course you do. Otherwise you wouldn’t be saying it, right?
Maybe.
What you’re saying and what the other person understands may be two different things. The way to know if what you say gets across is by paying attention to the response. Your communication is made up of both the message you intend to send out and the message you receive.
Communication between people, like magnetism, requires two poles: you and me. The message passes between us, and what you say is what I understand you to say, just as much as it is what you think you are saying.
THE MEANING OF YOUR COMMUNICATION IS THE RESPONSE YOU GET TO WHAT YOU SAY OR DO.
Interpersonal communication: an exchange between people. Sounds straightforward, doesn’t it? Yet the number one problem that sends people to therapists is lack of communication, people who can’t hear what the other person is saying. Husband and wife, parent and child, boss and employee, doctor and patient, partner and client—the problem is the same. They can’t get their message across.
With all the emphasis that’s usually placed on being a good speaker, one half of the equation has been forgotten. You can’t have magnetism with only one pole, and you can’t have communication without someone to receive what’s being conveyed: a listener for the speaker, audience for the actor, observer for the doer. Without a listener, there’s no dialogue. And that means no effective communication.
If you can’t listen well, you’ll never know if your point gets across. A good listener watches as closely as he or she listens. I learned that as a young actress: To be convincing onstage, you have to respond to cues; not only to the lines of another actor or a prompter but to everything that goes on around you.
As in the theater, so in life: All the world’s a stage, and how effective you are, how believable, depends on how easily you convey your meaning. If I’m doing a great dramatic role, a Lady Macbeth, and the audience is laughing, I can be absolutely sure I’m not coming across. The response tells me that the meaning of my communication—the meaning I intend—is not being delivered.
I have to stop and examine my behavior. Is it the tonality I’m using? Is it in my movements? Am I overdoing my gestures, talking so quickly that I sound like an organ grinder? The words remain the same, no matter who is saying them—“Out, damned spot”—but the message is contained as much in how it’s said as in what is said. What Shakespeare intends in Lady Macbeth’s speech is to illuminate her state of mind as she tries to wash away the guilt of the murder she’s just committed. If the words are spoken as if the owner of a Dalmatian is ordering her dog out of the kitchen, the meaning is lost.
Knowing how is as important as knowing what. That’s why there are great actors and mediocre ones. And that’s why some people are able to communicate easily or brilliantly, while others can’t ever seem to get their meaning across.
Those who can’t, generally confuse intention and result. They believe that when they’ve said what they’ve meant to say the communication is finished.
If Bill tells Susan “I love you,” meaning that he really loves her, and Susan goes “Yeah, sure, I love you too,” in a tone of voice that would be equally appropriate for “Pass the mustard,” it’s pretty obvious Susan isn’t getting the message that Bill is trying to send her.
Now what usually happens is, the person who feels he’s not being understood starts blaming the other. “What’s the matter with you? Why don’t you ever listen when I talk to you?”—things like that.
Or it’s this scenario: Bill comes home, says “I love you” to Susan, who doesn’t respond at all. Fifteen minutes later she says, “You never express any affection for me.”
He blows up. “I just told you,” he insists, “the moment I came into the house. What more do you want?”
She hadn’t heard him, not consciously. She was involved in chopping onions, her eyes were tearing, and all she noticed when Bill came in the door was that he seemed to be feeling very pleased with himself. What he said and what she heard were not the same. The feeling he meant to convey was not received. The love he offered wasn’t accepted—wasn’t even acknowledged.
CHAPTER 2
Getting the Message Out: Other-Orientation and Rapport
“HOW DO I LOVE THEE? Let me count the ways,” wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning to her husband, Robert Browning. In a quiet moment, listening to the rain play a soft percussion on the roof, or watching the green and blood orange of flames playing in a winter’s fireplace, Susan and Bill might talk of love like poets, billing and cooing, speaking with their lips and words and hands.
But on a late-summer afternoon, in a hot kitchen, preparing a meal she doesn’t particularly want to make for an old schoolmate of Bill’s, Susan doesn’t feel especially loving. She didn’t hear or respond to the love Bill is trying to convey.
“I told you I love you,” he repeats, “the moment I came in. Didn’t you hear me? Why don’t you listen when I talk to you?”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Susan tells him. “You were saying it only because you were feeling good about yourself. I don’t feel you reaching out to me at all. You don’t seem to grasp what goes on around here.”
Bill is indignant. “That’s not true, and you know it! I came over, I gave you a kiss. You must be deaf. I’m always telling you; you just never listen. I’m really trying to tune in to you.”
She hadn’t heard. Or if she did, it was a nuisance like static, coming between her and the onions she had to chop.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” she tells him. “My feet are aching, it feels like I’ve been working in this damn kitchen forever, the air’s heavy as molasses, and I certainly don’t have the sense that you’re on my wavelength or that you care about me. All you talk about is your own feelings.”
What Susan is telling Bill is that the message he thought he was sending her never got through, though she’s not aware she’s sayingthis—and he isn’t getting her gut message either. They’re speaking along different sensory pathways, passing and bypassing without noticing what the other is trying to say.
THE MEANING OF YOUR COMMUNICATION IS THE RESPONSE YOU GET, INDEPENDENT OF YOUR INTENTION.
For all of us, there’s a limited amount of attention we can consciously control.
The word consciously is key. We hear, see, feel, respond to a multitude of stimuli without being consciously aware of doing it.
Remember when you were a child, wrapped up in whatever game you were playing while your mother kept calling you to come in or come down or come to dinner, until she finally went and got you—demanding “Why don’t you answer when I call you?”—and you told her, truthfully it seemed, “I didn’t hear you”?
Technically speaking, you probably did hear her. Your ears probably registered the vibrations and frequencies of her voice. But it didn’t mean anything to you. It wasn’t part of your game; it had nothing to do with whatever you were paying attention to. You were attuned to something else and had no part of your attention left over for your mother’s call. Your brain didn’t process this particular information because the processing center was already fully utilized with something you considered more important at the time.
As we get older, many things change. We gain a greater degree of conscious control over ourselves in many ways, but we still can take in only a limited amount of information at any given moment.
Our attention span is restricted—span by definition is the distance from thumb to pinky in an outspread hand; it refers literally to what we’re able to grasp.
The conscious mind can pay attention to only seven pieces of information, plus or minus two, at any given moment. That’s a maximum of nine bits of information you can juggle at a time. Imagine taking a drink of water. You need to position each of your fingers on the glass, bring the glass to your lips, open your lips, make the necessary muscular adjustments for swallowing—all in all, a task much too complicated for anyone who would be required to do each part of it consciously.
Or think of learning to drive, particularly on a shift car. You’re cruising along in high gear, coming up a hill—and you see there’s a stop sign at the crest. Or maybe it’s a red light. It doesn’t matter; either of them can trigger a panic attack. You try to remember—the brakes, the clutch, something released, something pressed down, the gear to be shifted—and if it doesn’t happen to you when you’re slowing to a stop, it’s bound to happen when you try moving forward again: Inevitably, you’re going to stall.
A few weeks or months later you’ve learned how to do it and you no longer “think” about driving at all. The motions become automatic (even on a manual shift); your attention is freed to focus on something else.
Though our conscious attention is restricted to a minimal amount of information at any given moment, we still have a choice about which bits of information we select. We can choose where to aim our attention, directing it outward, toward another person, like the spotlight that picks out a dancer or an actor onstage, or we can shine the light of our attention back on ourselves. Our conscious mind is not set on automatic. We always have the choice of where we focus our attention, out toward others or inwardly.
When we’re sending out a message to another person (remember, this is interpersonal communication in contrast to intrapersonal, which is communication with oneself), the most effective direction to aim our conscious attention is on the other. We look and listen for specific indicators that tell us if, when, and sometimes how our message is being received.
In NLP, we call this other-orientation.
Other-orientation means paying attention to the other person, and to the signs and indications that person gives out, behavioral indicators that signify the message is received. Is he or she understanding your communication? Are you presenting what you have to say in a way that makes sense? How do you know? Does the other person give signs of seeing what you mean? Being in tune with what you’re saying? Grasping your argument? The emphasized words represent different sensory pathways through which people gather, organize, and store information: visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. We’ll be discussing this more a little later.
The information you get by paying close attention to how the other person responds tells you what part of the message was received and what wasn’t; it opens up a new range of choices in how to present or reframe your communication so it will be understood. To communicate most effectively, you need continually to reassess what you say in terms of how it is received. Communication, once started, is like a loop—between the message that’s sent out and the message that’s received. Each influences the other; each proceeds from the other. But before that can happen, you need to open the pathways between yourself and the other person and establish a foundation for communicating. That means you must first get the other’s attention. Unless the person you’re talking to is willing to listen, it doesn’t matter how brilliant or dazzling or amusing or even shocking you are. Like the child playing hopscotch at supper time, that person won’t hear you.
This doesn’t apply only to people with whom you have formal dealings; it applies to all types of communication, even with those close to you. The initial rule for communicating effectively is to get the other person’s attention.
And to do that, you must first establish rapport.
Rapport is the ability to hold someone’s attention and create a sense of trust. It means implanting the feeling that you understand each other; that you have the other’s best interests at heart and that you can be trusted to do whatever they’ve come to you for.
One way to establish rapport, something you’ve probably been doing anyway but without thinking about it, is behavioral matching. That means doing what the other person is doing—or something very similar. If the other person is sitting, you take a seat instead of standing. If the other is speaking with a soft voice, you modulate your own. It’s what we do unconsciously, particularly in new situations: following the other person’s lead, a modified form of Simon Says, without being aware that we’re doing it.
By becoming aware, which means making the choice to focus our conscious attention on matching another person, we can draw the other into a sense of rapport. You do something similar to what the other person is doing in order to create in him or her the feeling that you’re kindred beings, that you understand. Behavioral matching actually increases your understanding of the other person because you’ve aligned yourself with the other, literally put yourself in his or her position, and the increased understanding isn’t a pretense; it’s real.
This is not the same as mimicking, however, which would almost certainly have the opposite effect and break the rapport. Mimicking someone, copying the exact tonality or gait or repeating the words back verbatim is a way of teasing or making fun. Above all, it conveys disrespect. Instead, you want to create an environment of respect and understanding with the other person.
Specifically, you match posture, volume, and tempo. If the person you’re talking to is sitting, you won’t be standing because you don’t want to be placed at a higher level; it gives the impression that you’re speaking down, and that would not be the best way of relating, to put it mildly. In business, with personal relationships, or even with new, still undefined contacts, you want to start out at eye level. If the other person speaks slowly, it makes sense (and increases rapport) for you to slow down your own speech; you’ll speak softer or louder, depending on the cues you’re getting. Matching is like dancing, following someone else’s lead.
Matching creates the experience of being on the same wavelength. I’m reflecting back what you’re doing so we can dance together; my movements suggest yours; we’re in tune and in step with each other, seeing eye to eye, aligned with each other.
When you’re mismatching the behavior of the other, you’re out of sync, moving to a different drummer. You’re using a different tempo—or volume or posture—and it’s almost guaranteed to antagonize the other person so much that your communication has no real chance of getting through.
For example: You’re a Realtor, trying to convince someone to buy a house. They’re leaning forward and speaking slowly, and you’re leaning back and speaking fast. No rapport. No sale. No way.
You, the Realtor, are a city person, used to a hurried pace and to the distance city folk might like to put between themselves. Your clients are country people, used to slower ways, more time, intimacy. If you move your upper body forward, giving the impression that you’re really interested and that you have lots of time to hear them out, and speak in a slow, deliberative way, chances are good they’ll want to buy from you. If not this property, for sure the next.
RAPPORT EXERCISE
CHAPTER 3
Directing Consciousness:Uptime
TO COMMUNICATE EFFECTIVELY, we need to establish rapport with the other person. We do this by paying attention to behavioral clues the other person gives out. And to do that we need to be other-oriented, focusing our attention outward.
All of this we can do automatically. We’re often attuned to someone; rapport seems to happen naturally; communication sometimes just flows. Other times, none of this happens, and though we need to communicate for the sake of our livelihood, health, happiness, or simple equilibrium, we just can’t manage. At that point we need tools or techniques we can call up. We need to make our automatic actions conscious in order to understand what they’re composed of. Then we can apply these actions or behaviors to new situations, until they become automatic again. In other words, we have to reverse our learning, taking something we know how to do and learning how we do it so we can do it again in future without thinking about it.
In order to focus our communication skills so we can make use of them whenever we need them, we have to know how we think, how we direct our conscious attention. Tools are helpful only if they’re available at the right time and if we know how to use them. Having skills we can rely on means being able to direct our conscious attention toward some object or objective and not toward another.
Directing consciousness goes back to the concept that our conscious minds can pay attention only to between five and nine pieces of information at any given moment. Even if we stretch this to the maximum, to the full nine pieces, that doesn’t give us enough information to walk across the room. We couldn’t get from the door to the window if we had to pay conscious attention to everything we have to expand and contract, shift and do to move our body.
We have a very limited conscious mind, paired with an unlimited unconscious mind. Consciousness refers to what we’re aware of at any particular moment. The unconscious mind is made up of all our memories, knowledge, experiences—and the ways we’ve categorized all this information and experience, and labeled it, and given it meaning. All that is our unconsciousness, wide and deep as the sea.
Our conscious mind sails over it like a small boat, a speck by comparison to the vastness below. But we can control our conscious mind; we can take the small number of items of information we have at any given moment and use them to guide the ship wherever we want it—meaning ourselves—to go.
It’s precisely because our conscious mind is so limited that we can control which way it’s directed.
Most people are not aware that they have this choice. They don’t realize their consciousness is limited and therefore accessible. Usually, they’re in a mixed state, with three or four pieces of information (at best!) directed outside themselves and the remaining five or six pieces of information directed inside.
In other words, most of the time we’re primarily focused on ourselves (even if we’re not aware of it): on what we feel or think, what we’re saying to ourselves (“I can do this, I can’t do that”), what we’re remembering in the way of images, sounds, words, sensations, feelings. Usually, when we’re not consciously directing our attention—when we’re floating over the great sea of our consciousness, letting our thoughts drift, carried by whatever current—we are more focused on ourselves than on others.
When consciousness is directed inward in this way, we call it downtime. Downtime can be useful for many forms of creative work and for meditation and reflection, and it can be a conscious choice—a freeing of the imagination—that expands your sense of self. It is, however, a private place, where you communicate with yourself, not with others.
When your consciousness is focused externally, on what you see, hear, and touch, you are in uptime. This is the place for meeting others. This supports and allows other-orientation, the place to be mentally when you are observing another person’s response to something you’ve said, when you are measuring the other’s reaction to ascertain what they’ve heard of what you’ve said, to see if the message you meant to send out is the same as the one that was received.
Uptime is the best vantage point for people-watching, for noticing all the small changes and shades of response in gestures, words, and posture, in the tiny movements of an eyebrow or the drumming of fingertips. It sweeps away the inner agenda for a while, the secret messages you’re constantly bringing to mind in images and words, talking to yourself. It creates what’s essentially an “ego-less” state.
Your consciousness is directed toward what you see and hear outside yourself. The ego has been placed on hold like a boat on automatic pilot; the censorship coming from the conscious mind has been silenced. In uptime, there’s an open channel between your conscious and unconscious mind: words rise to the surface; your thoughts are spoken.
Uptime is a way of freeing the self from self. You’re not preoccupied with how you’re doing, but instead you take your functioning for granted and turn your attention to the world around you.
How do you do this? How do you get into uptime?
It’s the easiest thing in the world, like turning on the flashlight of consciousness or using words to capture a thought. But often the easiest is the most difficult—like taking the first step.
Focus on something outside yourself. Observe that somebody or something carefully. Pay close attention to what you see; use your eyes and your ears. Get the details.
Give yourself a simple observation task. Look at somebody closely: see what the person is wearing, the colors of the clothes, hairstyle, way of walking, sound of voice, taking note of the details but making no inference from them and coming to no conclusions. From this you begin to direct your attention outward, falling naturally into uptime.
You become aware of the person’s facial expressions, changes in posture, gestures—a nodding of the head or the pumping of a foot at the end of a crossed leg—and you listen, to the words and tempo and tonality, and pay attention to whatever else you might be able to notice, leaving all value judgments and interpretations aside, observing, not judging. Even this short list is more than the consciousness can handle at any one moment; it’s meant only as a little push, a way of getting into uptime, a movement of the conscious mind out of self-absorption and toward the external world by way of focusing on a particular object, thing, or person.
Getting into uptime is a way of energizing yourself, turning on to the world, shining your flashlight ahead of you. Get yourself out of the place you’re in, emotionally and physically. Go out; look and listen and sense with your body. Come alive! It just means pitching your attention in front of you. Notice the trees on the street, the gait of people walking, the wind or sun or rain against your skin, the sounds of traffic or water rushing or people talking. When you’re shopping for food, go over to the fruit and vegetables and find a beautiful color, an unusual shape: Hold it, look at it, maybe even smell it. Take in the beauty of that object. Uptime increases your pleasure in the world.
Try these exercises to move into uptime.
UPTIME EXERCISE I
1. Go out for a short walk, ten minutes or so.
2. Find as many of these as possible:
• The color orange/purple/yellow
• A triangle, a square, a circle
• An unusually shaped building
• Something with a smooth, silky texture
• Something rough-textured
• Birdsong—can you hear the birds?
• The wind in the trees
• A flower
• Sounds of children playing and laughing
3. Make your own list. You can even send yourself off on a treasure hunt, looking for very specific items (a black stone, a coin) that you can bring back.
4. Repeat this exercise every day until it becomes natural. When you go out for a walk, look and listen to the world outside yourself.
UPTIME EXERCISE II
CHAPTER 4
Calibration
Measurement began our might.
—W. B.Yeats
ANYONE WHO’S SAT at a sidewalk cafe or on a park bench for hours, watching the minidramas of everyday life going on all around, knows the endless fascination of observing human behavior. In a restaurant or airport lounge or across a hotel lobby; sitting on a bus, in a car, in traffic; gazing out the window from your office or study; waiting on line—anywhere at all, people-watching has got to be humankind’s favorite sport.
Everybody has a streak of the anthropologist. Or maybe it’s just natural curiosity. We want to know what’s going on with other people: What is she thinking? What is he feeling? What’s happening? Sometimes we make up stories about the people we observe—this one’s in love, that one has just been through tragedy. It’s fun, it’s imaginative, but it’s hardly reliable.
If you want to know what’s actually going on, what state another person is in, and how you can best engage the other’s interest, you have to pay attention to certain behavioral indicators. You calibrate behavior for consistencies and differences.
To calibrate is to measure, to determine the degree of deviation from a standard or norm. Humans have an amazing capacity for this; we can detect the slightest deviations, the minutest changes in someone’s tone of voice or facial expression or way of walking; we can recognize a mood on the telephone in an instant or see it half a block away in the gait of a person moving toward us.
But how do you measure thought? Feelings? Is there any way I can look at you and recognize where your thoughts are directed? Is there a measurement that tells me if you’re receptive to what I have to say? If you’re listening to me? If you’re understanding what I mean?
