watch tHe skies

I was reading an interesting article yesterday about baby talk. That is some of the theories around how you talk to your children and how that affects them. There’s a lot of views on whether people’s “inner voice” in adulthood is very much moulded by the way parents talk to them as children.

Now I make a point of only giving positive encouragement to little Ben. Right from when he was wee, to the strapping 16month old now who seems to understand everything we say to him. And going back to when he first started to react to me, giving some feedback, I would be encouraging, tell him how clever and funny he was and how much Mummy and Daddy love him.

And its interesting because it would get a reaction, it would, despite me knowing better, seem as if he understood the words even from a few months old, and would react accordingly.

And then it dawned on me. Something that babies are really, really good at, is watching and listening. He was responding to something, but it clearly wasn’t the words I was saying.

He was watching me and listening to me. He was reacting to how the things I was saying were affecting me. Because everything we say and do affects everyone in the system. And at a time where Ben didn’t know what words meant, he was able to detect all of the subtle unconscious signals my body was sending out to let him know that these were good messages, messages of encouragement and happiness and love.

And I think we all have that skill to greater or lesser extent even as adults, that empathic ability to pick up on the unspoken emotions of people. And of course we can affect them. Affirmations aren’t things we say to ourselves only, the words we use to others not only affects them, but us too.

So I wonder how different your next interaction could be if you tell them how great it is to see them, heck if they ignore the words they’ll still be affected by how you feel…!

I feel all warm now, come on it’s time for a group hug…..

…it’s WHO you know so often seems to ring true… Opportunities seem to present themselves always through contacts and discussions, and yet with so many adages, it’s not entirely true, is it? I mean you still have to know stuff.

And one of the most useful “stuffs” to know is what you want.

Having a goal in mind should be the prerequisite for any activity. After all it’s a lot easier to measure success when you have a success criteria in mind at the outset. And yet it is easy to bimble through life without any specific outcomes in mind.

So once you know what you want, it is then useful to know who can help you get there, so that “who you know” is only valuable after “what you want”.

Then it is useful to start to build up a network of contacts that can help you get there. Contacts that can:

• Make you feel good
• Mentor you and challenge you
• Give you direct and honest feedback
• Accept you as you are and support you emotionally
• Make things happen
• Raise your profile
• Provide you with valuable information and resources
• Open doors to new networks in your field of interest

I’ve attached a little word document (Build your network) you can use to fill this out if you are interested.

This will give you a good view of the strength of your network for reaching your outcome. And remember, networks are two way… the more networks you belong to for other people, the stronger your own network will be!

One of the universally useful things I have learnt in my NLP studies is the power of language, both in the sending and receiving of information, that is:

•  How people tell you about their problems is a metaphor for how they keep their problems in place
• How you ask questions can directly affect those problems and help them remove them

Which is an amazing revelation given that previously I was absolutely ignorant to the importance of what I say. That is I, knew that there were certain words that would trigger adverse reactions from my missus, but that’s about it.

So to discover the rich vein of information embedded in the process of communicating has hugely affected every chat I’ve had ever since. This hidden communication means that there’s so much more information available with which to understand people. Some of the things people give away unconsciously:

•   Words that mean something really important to them personally, words that when repeated to them will literally have them jump out of their seat and say “YES! You totally understand me!”
• How they actually process reality - which senses they use to build up their understanding of the world, and hence how their limiting beliefs work
• How they have managed to make a little problem become a massive hurdle

See, most people miss the interesting stuff because the person they are listening to has hypnotised them. That’s right, you see we are all hypnotists, because content is hypnotic. If I tell you how I feel, I might use words like confident, excited, happy, nervous, all of which are content words that reflect something I am feeling inside, and for you to make sense of them you have to go inside and access your interpretation of that feeling, so to greater or lesser extent depending on your state of mind compared to mine, my words affect your state, ie I hypnotise you.

And this hypnosis draws you further and further in, away from the process and in to more content and deeper trance.

That’s right.

And that’s why the average career span of a psychiatrist is about 8 years… imagine being hypnotised by depressed people for 8 years? More than enough for most, and 8 years too long for me.

And yet whilst you are listening to the why you miss the how which means you can’t ask questions that dislodge those problems, you can’t get enough perspective on the problem to bring the person outside of their reality.

So the challenge of any coach is to resist hypnosis and yet take in enough information to be able to ask useful questions.

And that is where the real skill comes in, something I am improving at all the time and yet still feel like an apprentice when I hear the real masters at work, where every question is rich with deliberately designed questions and commands to help the coachee make really quick and powerful changes to beliefs. It’s fantastic to listen to, and if you would like an insight in to how, I recommend that you pick up a copy of Jamie Smart’s Coaching with NLP (www.saladltd.co.uk), it’s a fabulous example of what I’m talking about, his linguistic skill is superb, I’m still noticing things in his language that amaze me, and I trained with him for 5 months. I still say to yourself “you must learn how to be a skillful communicator“.

And Jamie of course didn’t learn to do this overnight, by all accounts he spent hours practicing and writing out examples and applications of language patterns until the questions came naturally. Something I am doing now, and yet find incredibly hard, firstly trying to think of suitable applications, and secondly thinking of a hundred permutations so that the pattern gets wired in.

So that gives you an insight in to what I do with my spare time. Lines, hundreds of them. Seems like a chore and yet I’ve already seen the benefit of it, when one well phrased question can make such a difference to the person sat in front of me. And for the knowing amongst you, I wonder how many NLP language patterns you can find embedded in this post?

I ran a workshop last week with some managers who were trying to come to terms with what needs to change to grow the business in the next 5 years. During the first hour or so I heard a lot of the following.

• We can’t do that because…
• That’s a nice approach, but we are a different kind of company because…
• Common sense tells me…

These are all evidence of change-resistant paradigms, they are language patterns I often hear in coaching situations. They’re not necessarily wrong, it’s just if you look at ideas through “why I can’t” glasses, then you’ll get all the reasons for why you can’t, filtering out all of the reasons why you can.

See, in this case the managers’ mindset was one of resistance to change, and this was reflected in their language and attitude. After an hour or so I’d heard enough and I called the session to a halt and asked them to consider the ideas with the following questions.

• How can we make this work?
• How are we similar to that company?
• Common sense told Roger Bannister that the 4 minute mile wasn’t possible, yet within a year of him breaking the barrier, 12 other people ran sub-4 minute miles. Common sense is non-sense!

This reframed the workshop in to one of possibilities and opportunities, of what if’s and how’s instead of why can’t and stay the same. Consequently the workshop became very productive and the mood and level of teamworking improved greatly.

And this reminded me of a story I read about how NASA met JFK’s public announcement of putting a man on the moon within the decade. The story goes that when they looked at what was needed to succeed, the technology necessary was an estimated 30 years away on current roadmaps, so they split the development teams in to the pessimists (why I can’t) and optimists (how can I). The pessimists identified all of the risks and reasons why they couldn’t put a man on the moon, and NASA gave all of these reasons to the optimists, who systematically developed ways that they could solve those problems.

The result, as they say, is history, and the moral, if there is one, is that why I can’t can be a useful question to ask but only if followed by how I can… as NASA proved, we are capable of far more than we think we are, and barring a few simple laws of the universe which may be disproven in time, our ability to achieve is limited only by our self-limiting beliefs and our imagination.

And that was true for the workshop. With that new frame in mind, the group came together in a way I hadn’t seen before. Trust between the team grew before my eyes and the workshop became an open and honest session that made such progress that the Director rang me that evening to say how surprised and delighted he was in what they all came away with.

All that through a simple reframe. I wonder how this approach could help you today?

The other day, I read a great quote by Zig Ziglar, motivational guru, that really got me thinking.

“You can get whatever you want simply by helping enough people to get what they want.”

This is an excellent reframe from typical thinking. It’s easy to think about helping other people as a bind, a chore. After all, if someone asks you for help, advice or assistance, it’s time that you aren’t spending on your own goals, right? Well I’ll go ahead and say wrong!!!!

Firstly I think it’s productive not to think of yourself as a person, instead as the Managing Director of YOU Ltd., after all YOU sets your wage, your type of work and everything else, so why not make yourself MD of your own life.

And of course companies live and die by customer service, right, and good companies treat everyone coming for a meeting or calling the exchange with the same level of respect and high customer service… after all this week’s small order might be next week’s strategic partnership. And I think this is very relevant for helping other people.

See, the more people you help, and the more often you help them, the more likely you are going to become recognised as the “go to” person… that invaluable contact, that essential company that helps everyone get what they want.

And when you are in that rare, enviable position, you will reap benefits, whether it be financially, spiritually, in favours or any other way, because people going places need go-to people to get them there, and the more people that see you in that light, the more likely it will be YOU that gets the call for that opportunity to get you closer to your own personal goals.

So why not try out the customer-service mindset today. Who knows, you might even enjoy it and get a little closer to where you want to be tomorrow.

It’s a great time to have a curious 15 month old boy. It’s sunny and the garden is trimmed and safe for him to run around and discover fauna and flora. Ben’s intrigue knows no bounds as he digs and climbs and pulls and pushes his way around the garden, rapidly expanding his perception of the world.

Recently I taught him to “hi five”, it’s a great little social skill and it lets people interact with him in a safe way (he likes to pull glasses off noses and poke eyes because he doesn’t know that he shouldn’t). It didn’t take long, half an hour here and there over a couple of days and now he comes up to me and wants me to hi five him which is very cool.

He’s learning stuff all of the time and yet at the same time he doesn’t know that he can’t do a whole bunch of stuff; jumping being an interesting one. After all I cannot remember a time when I couldn’t jump, and yet Ben looks at me puzzled when I leap in to the air to demonstrate. He doesn’t yet have the information to even let him comprehend what I’m doing sufficiently for him to understand that it’s a skill he doesn’t have and can learn.

So the communication line is dead. We don’t have enough in common for him to understand what I’m trying to teach him. Despite of his voracious appetite for learning.

And it makes me wonder, when someone I talk to just doesn’t “get” what I’m trying to tell them, is it simply because we don’t have enough in common for them to understand? I wonder if finding out more about what they do know well, and using that knowledge to get my point across will save lots of time and frustration in getting to where I want them to go?

The highly observant amongst you will notice a new blog in the blogroll. Mark Harris runs a youth programme helping young people to find direction and motivation. He’s also an NLP trainer and runs the Leicester NLP practice group with boundless enthusiasm and energy.

All this and a very interesting and heartfelt blog, so head over to http://www.livingawake.co.uk and  take a look.

Mark is also running an NLP Practitioner training in November, so if you would like first hand experience of that which I talk about an awful lot, head over to his site or drop me a line for more information.

Learning stuff is great fun for many people, and a complete pain for others, and most would agree that there is never enough time to learn all the stuff that you want for that new job, or promotion, career change or just to be so damn good at something that everyone is prepared to pay you a tonne of cash just to get your thoughts on something.

And the reason for this is a good old thing called the competency model. No-one for sure knows where it comes from and it suggests that there are four stages of competency that we all go through”

1. Unconscious incompetence
You don’t know that a skill exists and therefore you don’t have it!
2. Conscious incompetence
You are aware of the existence of a skill but its something that you fail at or have to be very careful at doing successfully.
3. Conscious competence
You can successfully deploy the skill, although it takes conscious attention and concentration to do so.
4. Unconscious competence
You can do it in your sleep, the skill is “in the muscle” and requires no conscious processing power, it’s an automatic skill.

The idea is that to adopt a new skill you need to consciously work it out to the point that it becomes repetitive, at which point your unconscious says “hey I get it, it works like that, right?” and takes over. Learning to drive a car is a great example of these steps, if you are a driver, if not then consider walking. Our little man Ben has only recently moved to unconscious competence with walking, as he now happily eats, drinks and talks whilst walking, whereas a few weeks ago he would fall over if someone called his name whilst he was concentrating on putting one foot in front of another without losing balance.

So it works, as a model of learning it is very useful. It does, however, underestimate the power and intelligence of the unconscious mind. After all, does everything have to go through the conscious mind to be learnt? Can you think of examples of learning directly by the unconscious? How about music… do you consciously analyse the notes of a tune and go through the 4 stages to be able to hum something? The unconscious mind is very, very smart, and it can learn stuff all by itself and put you straight to step 4, if you let it. And if you would like to know how, read on. (more…)

Gillian McKeith, the diminuitive and forthright Scottish nutritionist tells us “you are what you eat”, that your diet directly affects your physical and emotional wellbeing. This is increasingly difficult in the age of processed, quick foods and fast paced lives.

Lifestyles are evolving at a much greater pace than our digestive systems, and so as the obesity epidemic spreads across the developed world, people are taking more and more notice of the nutritional value of the foods they eat. Heck, even McDonalds openly tell you that a box of fries has as much fat in them as an equal weighting of lard. How do they do that? The miracle of food science.

Now as we know as readers of this blog, our mind and body are one system. What affects one affects the other, so Gillian is of course right to say that what we eat affects both physical and mental health. Give the brain the right nutrients, manage your insulin levels properly and there is a very high chance that you will feel better, happier and more alert.

So I wonder how much your mind affects your body? Lots of course, just imagine yourself eating a lovely, fresh, crunchy bit of fruit, with the juice spilling across your tongue and splashing against your gums and you will notice that you’re salivating more, purely as your mind influences your body.

So if you are what you take in nutritionally, surely you are also what you take in mentally? (more…)