Communications in Action NLP

7/31/2019 Communications in Action NLP

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NLPWhat on Earth is it?

Peter Freeth

Communications In Action

NLP Workshop

EA Summit 2003

2ndApril 2003


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Ingredients

What is it? What do I do with it?

Whats next?

The interesting thing about an agenda is that its a summary that comes before the main

presentation or meeting, instead of at the end where summaries usually come. Your

audience will look at the agenda points, imagine what the topics are and decide right

then what theyll listen to.

You may have been on presentation skills courses that recommend tell them what

youre going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what youve told them. This is fine if

you only want to tell them instead of involve and engage them.

I use Ingredients instead of agenda as it keeps the audiences mind open, and thats

often a good state to be in when you want to learn something new and useful!


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What is it?

Neuro Linguistic Programming A study of the relationship between language

and behaviour

Is there a structure of excellence?

If so, can we replicate it?

Advanced common sense

Everything YOU do when you are at your best

Modelling exceptional performance

NLP started out, about 30 years ago, as a study of exceptional communicators in the

field of therapy.

Richard Bandler and John Grinder wanted to know if there was an underlying structure

to the results that a certain group of therapists were getting. These people were able to

get results with individuals and families that other therapists could not even get close to,

and these results came amazingly quickly.

It turned out that there was indeed a structure and they published this in their first book

Structure of Magic.

Our language and behaviour are closely interwoven, and both are indicative of the way

that we represent the world inside our heads. For example, you can close your eyes and

still imagine seeing these words. Somehow, the words are still in your head and you can

see them as if your eyes were open. The same thing happens with every component of

your rich life experience and the way that you organise this experience is revealed in

your language and your actions.

At its heart, NLP is a specific, formal structure for modelling exceptional performance in

any area where the high performing individual is unable to consciously explain how they

achieve the results they get.


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To make NLP

State Outcomes

Senses

Language

Maps

HypnosisNew!

NLP training typically breaks the subject into six key areas. We wont be covering

hypnosis in this presentation.


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State

Your mental, physical and emotional condition States are useful in the right context

States are a source of energy

Successful people maintain their states!

Your state is the starting point for everything you do. When youre feeling good about

yourself, you breeze through the day and easily deal with problems that would slow you

down on a day when youre feeling miserable.

If youre going to write your life plan or even your business plan you will write a more

optimistic plan if youre in a positive state.

In fact, states are neither good nor bad in themselves they are just useful in a context

or not. They are either helpful to you in achieving your outcomes or theyre not.

People who are good at achieving their outcomes are often very good at maintaining

useful states regardless of what happens around them. This also implies that they can

readily choose a state for a particular outcome, regardless of whether anyone else

would label that state good or bad.

In a world of logic and science, its easy to dismiss your state and say you have to get

your job done regardless of how you feel about it. Well, you can certainly take this

approach if you insist on making your life difficult and unpleasant! We know that people

who take this approach tend to end up very stressed and unproductive. Wouldnt it be

better if you could simply put aside whatever was on your mind and say whats the most

useful state to help me achieve this?

If, each morning, you could choose your state for the day, what would you choose?


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State exercise

In pairs, ask for a memory with a strongemotional attachment a good one!

Offer ruthless encouragement!

Make the picture bigger

Make the sounds louder

Make the feelings stronger

Enjoy it, then come back gradually

We practiced eliciting specific states in pairs, which is a very useful thing to be able to

do. Remember that from states, people derive their perceptions of what happens and

these perceptions influence behaviour.

Therefore, someone who is good at managing other peoples states is generally very

good at getting the best from people. Youve probably seen this happen at work, and

youre probably good at this yourself in certain situations.

NLP is about learning the structure of experience, so its about learning how you are

good at managing other peoples states and using that skill consistently.

Successful people tend not to do one thing much better than other people. They tend to

be only slightly better than average people, but better consistently and across many skill

areas.

Learning about NLP will therefore make you consistently more effective!


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State exercise

Pick a good state motivation, enthusiasm Picture

Location & size

Qualities colour, movement, border, focus

Sounds

Location, volume, qualities

Feelings

Location, movement, temperature

Try it on have your partner help you

Is motivation, enthusiasm, fear or confusion the same for you as it is for me? It must be,

because we use the same word right? No!

Language is such a pale representation of the rich internal experience that we all have in

our heads. What I call confusion is quite relaxed to other people. Someone elses

confusion might feel like blind panic to me.

The first step in understanding people better is to understand how differently we each

perceive our common world. Its not enough to suspect that other people experience

things differently its very useful to actually try on someone elses perceptions, and

thats what we do in this exercise.


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Outcomes

Pick a goal Check that its positive

Check the pictures, sounds and feelings

Check for ecology

If you get it, what will you gain?

If you get it, what will you lose?

If you dont get it, what will you lose?

If you dont get it, what will you gain?

Would you take it right now?

The first step to getting what you want is knowing what you want. That might seem

obvious, but youd be surprised how many people go round in circles in their lives

because they know what they dont want, but not what they do want perhaps you know

someone like this.

This is one of the most important exercises in NLP well formed outcomes.

Essentially, if you express a goal or objective in the format shown above, its more likely

to happen. Later on, well play with some more advanced language that, when used with

this tool, makes your wildest dreams practically inevitable!


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Outcomes

Clear outcomes and flexible behaviour are themain tools of successful people

Pick a character thats different to you

A teenager

A five year old child

A politician

A parent

Someone you know who is always right

Someone you know who is very manipulative

Someone you know who is a great negotiator

Once successful people know what they want, they are very open minded about how

they achieve it. More than that, they are open to try anything, whether it will appear to

work or not.

Compare this to people who have a very fixed plan of action that doesnt adapt to

changing circumstances these people frequently get frustrated and give up whereas

successful people can easily adapt to new situations and new information in order to

exploit those changes to their own advantage.

Flexibility is something you can learn and practice, and this exercise demonstrates one

of the easiest ways to do that.

In the spirit of modelling excellent performers, you just borrow the skill you need from

someone who has it! We are born modellers its how we learned to speak, walk and do

most of the things that we take for granted today.


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Outcomes

Pick a negotiation topic: What to watch on TV

Where to go on holiday

What to have for tea

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

This exercise also allows participants to throw of the behavioural rules that normally

restrict the results they get, so they can learn for themselves that sometimes the most

effective behaviour isnt necessarily the one they would naturally choose.


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Senses

Noticing what happens Gathering high quality feedback

Not imagining, but seeing and hearing!

Rapport

Empathy

Rapport is a communication channel

You may have seen the concept of matching and mirroring that goes way back to body

language studies. In NLP training, youll spend some time on the subject of rapport, yet

its really using your senses thats important.

We spend much of our lives inside talking to ourselves, making pictures, doubting,

questioning, even worrying instead of paying attention to what goes on outside.

Developing the use of our senses to gather high quality external data gives us more

information in order to make better decisions.

Rapport is a state of harmony between two or more people. When people are in rapport,

their physiology is closely matched and so are their internal processing systems. In other

words, they look the same and they think the same. Think of someone that youre so

close to that, sometimes, it seems that you can read each others minds. Is this

telepathy, or is it a close synchronisation of mental and behavioural patterns?

Rapport is often over-used in sales training, personally I think most customers today can

decide for themselves whether they like someone or not and can easily spot the obvious

tricks taught to less ethical sales people. If you agree with someone, youre likely to be

in rapport with them. If you dont then you probably wont be. You should pay attention to

the degree of rapport you have with someone as it reveals a lot about the way youre

thinking and may give you important information that you werent consciously aware of.


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Language

Language and behaviour are interwoven Language predicts behaviour

Language influences behaviour

Both internal and external language

Delete

Distort

Generalise

For information to be stored in our memories, it is filtered to remove anything that were

not paying attention to. This filter is made up of our beliefs, ideas, perceptions,

preconceptions and of course our state.

The filter works in three specific ways;

Delete just ignore or remove sensory data

Distort change sensory data so that it matches our expectations

Generalise make sensory data less complex so that its easier to interpret

You can probably think of many things that you do now that demonstrate those filters in

action. Perhaps youve lost your car keys or not heard the phone ringing? Deletion.

Have you interpreted something that someone said in a very different way and been

certain that they said what you thought, not what they actually said? Distortion. Have

you ever decided not to do something because it went badly last time? Generalisation.

All of these filters are useful we could not function without them so being aware of

them gives you the choice of how to respond and behave to situations, instead of letting

your auto pilot decide for you.


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Get yourself going!

Internal language has a big influence on you Self criticism

Change it its your voice!

Motivation

Must Should Could Need

Want Will Might Ought

Pick the one that works for you and rephrase

your original goal

Do you nag or criticise yourself? The internal language that you use can have a massive

impact on your state, yet no-one ever tells you how to use it effectively.

Firstly, its your voice it can say anything you want it to say!

Just like someone in the office who always complains, your internal voice will get very

whiny if its criticism is ignored. Just think of the voice as another one of your senses

which language is so think of the voice in the same way as you think of your gut

reaction. The great thing about the voice is that it can be so much more specific.

If your voice is overly critical or if you know someone else who nags themselves too

much, theres a really simple technique you can use. You can easily tell when someone

does this as theyll say things like I told myself I should have know better youll be

amazed how much of what people say is quite literal.

So, heres the trick when the voice criticises you, just answer it straight back with

something like Thankyou! Now, what do you suggest I do instead? or Thankyou! Now,

how is that feedback useful to me? Youll see that the structure is acknowledge then

question, and youll be amazed at how well it works.

The other amazing thing your internal voice can do for you is motivate you to get the

things that are important to you done. Just pick the word that you use when you do

something you naturally do easily, and use it to phrase the goals you want to achieve.

For example, I should go to the gym tends not to motivate most people, whereas I willgo to the gym is much more compelling.


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Maps

In your head is a complex 3D map of yourexperiences and beliefs

Abstract concepts are represented in space

Your perception of time affects everything!

Imagination is reality

Your brain is organised like a filing room. The memories themselves arent necessarily

good or bad theyre just raw data.

Imagine you take an invoice and put it in the unreliable payer file. How would someone

else treat that customer? Now put the same invoice in the good customer file and

notice the difference.

Now, take a memory of a holiday and put it in the great holiday file, and notice how the

little mishaps and problems seem funny because, overall, you made the most of the

holiday. Put the same memory in the holiday from hell file and notice how the things

that did go well get lost amongst all the awful things.

The interesting thing is, its entirely up to you where you file these memories, and once

youve filed them, you can easily move them around!


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Mind reading

In pairs, ask your partner to talk about a recentexperience

Ignore the words

Watch their eye movements, gestures and

physiology

Hear their voice tone, volume, pitch Notice where they locate different concepts

Pay attention to patterns

You may have heard that only 7% of communication comprises words. Whether you

agree with the figure or not, we can at least agree that words are not the only

communication channel available to you.

Our bodies radiate information about us all the time, revealing our thoughts, beliefs,

state and even our values and interests. We naturally pick up on this information and

use it to form intuitive opinions about people we meet. I think that one of the most useful

things you can realise is that your intuition isnt an unsubstantiated guess, but is in fact

the culmination of your brains ability to acquire and process huge volumes of

information that youre largely unaware of. You really should trust your intuition more!

When you really watch and listen to the way that people communicate, youll see allkinds of signals that reveal how they organise their internal memories. Youll see

gestures and movements that tell you where they are, how they perceive time, how they

deal with unhappy experiences, how they motivate themselves and much more. You

dont need to know why they do this or what it all means it doesnt mean anything

its just the way theyre wired up.

Paying attention to this kind of information is very useful as it helps you communicate

with other people much more elegantly and effectively.


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Changing the map

Take an unhappy or troublesome memory Move the picture further away, dimmer,

smaller, fuzzier..gone

Make the sounds quieter, more distant, an

echo

Move the feeling to the edge of your body,then let go of it

Now try and remember how that memory used

to trouble you

As a broad generalisation, people tend to be organised so that a picture associated with

a memory has qualities that correlate with the emotional content. By changing the

qualities such as picture size and location, you can change the emotional attachment.

People do this entirely naturally, and you can hear them teaching each other to do it:

Youve got to put it all behind you

Ive pushed it into a dark corner of my mind

I need to distance myself from it

You can see them doing this too they point to the location of the picture and you can

see them looking at it. You can help an unhappy friend by literally grabbing thetroublesome picture and moving it further away!


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Changing the map

Take a happy memory and give it a word Bring the picture closer, brighter, bigger,

clearer, more colourful

Turn the volume up, clearer, closer

Turn up the intensity of the feeling, spin it,

move it, adjust the temperature

Anchor it with a colour and the word

Conversely, happy pictures tend to be close, big and bright. You know how good it feels

when you have a bright future, or when your life has some colour in it!

You can associate complex emotional responses with very simple stimuli such as

colours and sounds or words. When the state peaks, see the colour and say the trigger

word. Afterwards, just see the colour and say the word and the state will come flooding

back. Advertisers do this to you all the time, its another natural human process.

So, if youre going to tidy out your filing room you might as well push away all the stuff

you dont need and bring all the things that make you feel good about yourself up close,

just as you would surround yourself with happy photos or mementos.


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So, what was it?

NLP is a way of modelling intuitive behaviour NLP has become entwined with its tools

It has become associated with therapy,

influence, communication and leadership

Its a simple model for achieving excellence

Many people recognise the tools of NLP as being NLP itself. Remember that NLP wasnt

invented in a cave in Tibet it was modelled from real people like you. Therefore, most

of the tools are just common sense, refined, distilled and made into an easy to use

format that we can all copy.

Its quite usual for you to think that much of NLP is what you already do, because it is.

Just dont expect everyone to do what you do! And, there are probably still times where

you could use your skills more effectively or more consistently.


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What do I do with it?

Coaching Training and development

Sales, PR and marketing

Facilitation and mediation

Business and personal planning

Anywhere you can apply a model of excellence

Any area where you want to achieve

consistently outstanding results

Here are a few applications for NLP in business. In fact, NLP can be used anywhere in

business to get better results, so these ideas are just a few obvious ones where the

results will be the most tangible, immediate and easy to introduce.


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What next?

Much NLP training is still not business oriented Websites for more NLP applications:

www.ciauk.com

www.theskillsnetwork.com

www.nlpinbusiness.comwww.changemagic.com

Helping you get the results you want, moreeasily and more often!

There are many NLP training organisations in the UK, and some of them are now

offering Business Practitioner courses. In the main, the people running NLP training

come from a therapeutic or educational background, so their approach to business

training still doesnt fit comfortably with what most organisations expect. This has

resulted in a fairly slow uptake of NLP tools in an overt way in UK business, although

youll find that the majority of good sales and soft skills training is based directly upon

NLP its just not explicitly mentioned.

The websites above are three places where you can find out more about NLPs

application in business.

And it goes without saying that I can help you apply NLP directly in your business to getbetter results quickly!

You can contact me, Peter Freeth, and Id love to help you learn more about NLP and

how you can use it to your advantage:

0870 1620802

[email protected]

www.ciauk.com
http://www.ciauk.com/http://www.theskillsnetwork.com/http://www.nlpinbusiness.com/http://www.changemagic.com/mailto:[email protected]://www.ciauk.com/mailto:[email protected]://www.ciauk.com/http://www.changemagic.com/http://www.nlpinbusiness.com/http://www.theskillsnetwork.com/http://www.ciauk.com/


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Famous last words

So, what on Earth is NLP?

What can you do with it?

Whats the first area where it can help you

make a difference?

Many people ask me what can NLP do for me? and the answer is nothing.

By learning about NLP and by getting better results more consistently, you can make a

difference, because you can do anything you turn your mind to.

I look forward to helping you achieve your wildest dreams, and I leave you with my

favourite quote:

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

Willy Wonka


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Thank you!



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Peter Freeth 2002


www.ciauk.com

[email protected]

0870 1620802

http://www.ciauk.com/mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]://www.ciauk.com/

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