watch tHe skies

In the last month or so I’ve been pretty successful in acquiring some of the seminal NLP texts that are no longer in print. Titles such as Frogs Into Princes, Using Your Brain, Structure of Magic and Trance-Formations are easy enough to get… however for the most part you have to pay big bucks for them because demand outstrips supply and the fair price for many of these books is now £30-40. Indeed on Amazon you can get a brand spanking never been opened copy of Trance-Formations for a little over £300. The challenge then is not to find these books but to pay what I consider to be a reasonable price to uncover the jewels within.

I’ve also gotten hold of a few Richard Bandler recordings - State Of The Art is an excellent collection of his old McKenna \ Breen NLP Practitioner trainings, which I’ve copied over to MP3 so I can listen to them whilst gardening or taking the bairn for a walk. Most of the videos are of Bandler sitting on a stool doing his special brand of stand-up therapy, so they make for excellent listening whilst his multi-layered metaphors and embedded commands (hopefully) sink deep in to my unconscious.

It occurred to me as I cruised ebay, lost out on a few bids to people prepared to pay hundreds of pounds for some of these items, that perhaps NLP was becoming some sort of religion, and that perhaps one day, when the founding fathers have left their mortal bodies to become part of the great Unconscious, that NLP itself may resemble a religious faith more than a group of useful therapeutic and coaching technologies.

After all, most NLPers are evangelical about the topic in a way that you only experience elsewhere in those people trying to save us all in the market square on a saturday afternoon. Already the original scriptures of NLP are scarce and sought after by its followers, the truth behind much of the fall-out between Bandler and Grinder is now popular myth, and the whole premise is founded on the belief that there is something within us all that resembles the unconscious mind.

And perhaps that is the origin of religion - the point where fact becomes belief, I don’t know, theology is but one area I know little about. And of course all of this could a pointless wondering on a friday morning that does little more than give you a scary insight in to the stuff that I think about when most are asleep.

Recently I’ve begun reading Ben bedtime stories. He’s 11 months old now and although I don’t know how much of what I say he understands - I bet it’s a lot more than we think. So I thought he would benefit from a little story each night.

Thankfully there are millions of bedtime storybooks so I don’t think he’ll ever get bored of them. The one that we are working through has lots of little stories, maybe 3 to 4 pages long. To be fair they aren’t that riveting, but they help Ben to sleep and I’ve also noticed that reading them is damn good practice for storytelling.

Of course all of these stories are metaphors. In the case of this particular collection, all of the metaphors seem to be related to healthy eating - we have the boy who only eats cheese and peas who gradually learns to eat a balanced diet, the princess who only eats sweets and the giant who runs out of cakes. The beauty of metaphors with kids is that whilst they enjoy the story, the message gets processed by their unconscious and (hopefully) influences their behaviour. I wonder if they do one about the boy who nearly got an ASBO?

Anyway I digress. Metaphors don’t only work on kids. When anyone tells us adults a story - it’s time to curl up and enjoy the ride. Metaphors still reach our unconscious mind and get processed at least unconsciously. I like to think of a metaphor as a trojan horse… the story is accepted at face value by the conscious mind, which allows the horse to bypass its outer defences. Once inside the defensive walls of the mind, the deeper messages of the metaphor can be released, creeping in to the inner santums of the castle undetected. (more…)

I’ve added a new site to my blogroll - Anchievement in mind, the blog covers quite a few of the topics I talk about, and many more, and is definitely worth a look if you find some of my NLP \ hypnosis articles of interest. Head over and say hello.

“This blog is about exploring opportunities. That’s right, opportunities! We take care of everything better than we take care of ourselves, mostly due to the lack of knowledge how to. We have forgotten how to deal with ourselves other than completely rationally, we have forgotten how to use our own brain properly.

That’s where the opportunity lies: Exploring new ways of thinking! I have devoted several years of my life now to studying different ways of exploring the human mind, from scientific approaches to even shamanic techniques, and this blog is about things that we can all do, easily, and that can help us reclaim peace of mind. If you are interested in finding out about what is really going on up there, and how to optimize its usage, then welcome to the journey with achievement in mind!”

So last week, I was talking about maps. Maps of reality… how we don’t experience reality directly, but through a set of filters, our beliefs, meta-programs, our previous experiences etc etc, all of these contribute to our interpretation of reality. I like to think of it as our approach to filing, for example if you have a filing system for stuff at home - bills, statements etc etc.. where you file a letter from the water company might differ from how I might file it, and that may be because the importance or relevance of that letter for you will likely differ from the importance I put to it. This is true for reality. Let’s say you are a glass half full kind of person and I’m a glass half empty person.

So as these people, we are both driving to work and we both get stuck on red lights for six blocks. Now you, as the optimist, might not even notice that you’ve been stuck on red… you’re glad to be out in the car, listening to your favourite tunes, whilst I as the pessimist, am counting every single second I am stuck in traffic, wondering why the world is conspiring to make me late for work.

The same reality happened to both of us, but we “filed” it differently. The meaning of those six successive red lights was different for each of us, based on who we are and our mindset at that point. because how I interpret those lights will differ for me personally from day to day, and hour to hour, depending on my state of mind, what’s happened to me today, what’s on the radio (music is a great anchor for states) and a bunch of other stuff that I could write about all day.

Ok so revision lesson over. This stuff is cool to know because once you understand filters and the fact that people make meaning from reality, you can understand that people have opinions and views for a reason, and once you know this you are but one step away from having Jedi powers.

Once you are comfortable with the concept that the map is not the territory, you can lead people to new maps, or to enriching their map. Rather than the traditional argument of - “you don’t get it, that’s not true”, by meeting people at their map - letting them know that you understand why they think that… what must be true for them to think that way, you can begin to lead them to new maps, or ways and information that enriches their map and can help them break problems, see new opportunities or realise that they should buy your product.

So ditch lines like

“what you need to understand…”
“the truth of the matter is…”
“my point is this…”

and replace them with something like

“I understand that you believe that because of X, and that’s ok, I had a friend who also felt like that, however when he also understood Y, then he began to wonder whether Z was a realistic way forward…”

Here, you are meeting them at their map, letting them know that’s ok to think that given their circumstances, and then adding new information in a very gentle way to enrich their map and hence make them aware of new ways forward. There’s some other patterns in that suggestion too, which you can read more about if you take a look at Jamie Smart’s Influential Language Cards, or Kevin Hogan’s Covert Persuasion book.

Now, a lot of this might be new to you, and that’s ok, I wondered whether this stuff really works when I first read about it, and whether it was right to influence people like that. However then I realised that naturally persuasive people already do this unconsciously and get great results, and once I started to use this approach I found that it was comfortably easy to help people see new perspectives on their situation, without feeling like I’ve manipulated them…

Aaah the relaxing sensation of a long, lazy weekend, basking in the hot easter sun, enjoying a cool, refreshing beer as I lean on my shovel and gaze at the cavernous hole that was once a little gravel and brick “feature” in my back garden…

I’m not a religious man, but I am thankful to whoever gave me this long weekend as a chance to recharge my batteries and begin the garden remodelling that will most likely be finished off by someone who knows about gardening.

Still, it was good to make headway on the obsolete feature. This part of the garden had been there for a long time, but had served little positive purpose, rather it annoyed me and made me wonder if I was capable of doing something about it. I’m not that skilled with practical projects, so I had ignored it. However with a long stretch of good weather in front of me I began to dig, loosening the compacted earth and shoveling the unwanted gravel and dirt in to the wheelbarrow. Once I got moving I found that it wasn’t half as hard as I had halucinated that it would be. And how had I set myself expectations without a comparitive situation? Sometimes it’s good to put aside assumptions and experience things through doing, as it turns out that change is usually a lot easier than we imagine it might be.

In addition to gardening, I managed to listen to some of Richard Bandler’s “Personal Genius” CD set. Misleading title really because this is a recording of Bandler doing his trademark changework, layers upon layers of metaphors, loops, embedded commands and lots more that I can’t detect. It certainly tranced me out for long periods which made digging tough at times, but it is certainly fascinating listening. The thing I like about Bandler’s recordings is that they are great for listening to whilst doing something else (except driving) because for the most part he’s not talking to your conscious mind anyway.

So, back to the grindstone tomorrow. Shirts ironed. Clean pants. If only Easter could last a few more days, especially when the sun is shining, even so I’m sure I’ll get back to my gardening when I return from work tomorrow.

I’ve done a lot of study in my time, and figured that I had a pretty good grip on the world, how it works, and what is behind the curtain. However, when I started studying NLP, my grip on the world turned out to be a grip on my perception of the world, which is a very different thing indeed.

What on earth does that mean (pardon the pun)? Ok, so one of the presuppositions of NLP is that “the map is not the territory”. My understanding of that is that people don’t experience reality directly. Sure, they see what they see, hear what they hear, and smells, sensations and tastes are all linked to reality. However, raw data from “reality” is filtered by your mind even before it hits the senses - remember, you don’t look at everything, you choose to look at certain things. And even the data you do choose to take in is filtered by many aspects - your view of life (are you a glass half full or empty person), your experience and how you’ve coded that, your beliefs and much much more. Effectively you receive and filter information which becomes your map of reality.

By map I mean this - is the London Tube Map ACTUALLY London? No it’s a representation of part of it, the parts of London that are useful for the purpose of navigating the underground. Is the Atlas ACTUALLY the world? No it’s just a map of the real thing. It doesn’t have every single rock and building on it, just the information useful for understanding the geography of the planet. Your map is a representation of reality created and maintained by you for the purpose of navigating life. It will always have parts missing… a child doesn’t have its map coded that fire hurts until it burns itself and very quickly modifies its map.

So although you are interacting with reality every day, you don’t experience it, and haven’t done, ever. You could argue that a baby doesn’t have any of those filters, and perhaps you are right, but perhaps you need to consider when a baby can possibly have NO filters at all? At birth? Before birth? Are they genetically coded? That’s a whole new discussion.

So what does this mean? Well one way of looking at it is that perhaps all of those things that you thought are true aren’t necessarily true. On finding out that his father was in fact Darth Vader, Luke complained to the spectral Obi Wan, who told him that what he had said was the truth “from a certain point of view”. And perhaps this is a way of seeing what the truth is… our “maps of reality” are all from certain points of view, and even if we dedicated our lives to seeing reality from every point of view, the map still wouldn’t be complete because we would have to interact with everyone and everything in the universe.

So the fact that your map of reality is incomplete means that everyone you meet and everything you do has the potential to enrich your map and give you new perspectives. This, for me, changed my view of other people, particularly those that I didn’t agree with. I went from thinking “he doesn’t know what he’s talking about” to “I wonder what must be true for him to think that”, and at that moment I immediately started to learn more from every person I met, every TV show I watched and every walk I took. For me, accepting that my view is just that, a perspective on reality shifted my attitude to what it meant to experience reality.

Of course everything I’ve written is my interpretation of my map, right at this moment, and not necessarily true, but perhaps an interesting perspective?

I was browsing this morning and found this excellent site run by Joanna Young, an Edinburgh-based Life Coach. She’s posted a great article on enriching your map, well worth a read, and it inspired me to write this.

So last night I worked with someone on becoming a non-smoker. Smoking is a tough nut to crack because there is more going on than a simple habit. After all, for smokers, being a smoker is a habit, a belief and an identity, and you really need to work on all 3 to effect a change.

We did a whole bunch of work around the triggers for smoking, and worked to break the unconscious behaviours around those triggers. The idea here is to make the decision to smoke in certain situations and conscious one rather than unconscious. Once it is conscious then you have choice over whether to smoke or not. We didn’t have time to work on every single trigger, instead we focused on the most important ones. If you are interested in more detail of what I did, contact me and we’ll chat about it on email.

One of the coolest things we did was something that I haven’t tried before, and that is getting the client to make contact with their unconscious mind. You see, a lot of NLP seems just like fun on the surface, and it’s easy for a client to go away a little tranced, wondering what the point was and spending effort disbelieving that any change was made. In my experience I haven’t had anyone disbelieve all of the change, but they can affect the impact of the change if they disbelieve it strong enough.

So inspired by part of the reframing technique in my lovely new copy of Bandler & Grinder’s ‘Frogs Into Princes’, and similar to the technique used by Richard Bandler in ‘The Bandler Effect’, I decided to get the client to have a conversation with her unconscious. Tad James uses this in hypnotherapy to check that the information will be acted upon (see Hypnosis - A Comprehensive Guide), but you don’t need to be ‘in hypnosis’ (whatever that means) to have it work.

The idea was, to close the sesssion, that I would have her speak to her unconscious and ask it if it was ready to make the changes necessary to become a non-smoker. The intent was that she would experience something very unique that would serve as a convincer that deep-down, parts of her resonsible for unconscious behaviour had been listening and were invested in making the change that she wanted to make consciously.

So here’s how I did it. You can try this at home if you like…hey it’s a pretty cool thing to be able to do… to converse with the part of you that handles almost all of the operations required to keep you alive… it also happens to be much smarter than you and have a better memory, so getting in touch with your unconscious can have significant impacts on your life, career, performance, wellbeing and many other things. (more…)

A big thanks to Kate, who found me a copy of Bandler & Grinder’s Frogs Into Princes for a paltry £12 including package. Finally I can ditch my knackered old photocopy and enjoy the book for real.

Now if I can just find Structure of Magic I&II, Reframing and Trance-Formations to go with it I’ll have my own personal NLP reference library!

I often get asked what the heck NLP is. And I usually give a new answer depending on what my distortions, generalisations and deletions are at that time.

Tonight I came across this post on a blog explaining the communication model - how we experience reality. This post is a great place to start if you want to understand NLP, so why not head over there and have a read. There’ll be a test tomorrow…

Since that muppet went on Dragons Den and wanted to run a Live Coaching website I’ve been assaulted with a hail of questions on my opinion of what was said by the Dragons.

Firstly, although she mentioned NLP she didn’t seem to practice it… where was the rapport? Or any other technique that might help in a sales presentation, remembering that these guys have probably been badly NLP’ed a million times by clunky salesmen who did a bit of persuasion on some course. Of course the rapport could have been edited out to make the pitch more dramatic.

The last thing that coaching needs is the Dragons criticising it. I do understand their concern though - there are a lot of people out there being very evangelical about it’s benefits because of the potential money involved… in reality I think that there is a lot less money in the marketplace for this service because the public in general don’t see the point. People “get” and accept hypnotists nowadays but it will be a long time before personal coaching is a reality for all but the wealthy.

The woman on Dragon’s Den did have a good idea though - that people could be helped with only 6 questions. Now I don’t know what 6 questions she was going to ask, but if I was asking six questions to coach someone on a problem they would be:

(after they have the problem in mind)

1) What do you want?
2) How will you know you have got it?
3) What is different from when you have got it from what you have now?
4) What is stopping you doing it now?
5) What are your options?
6) What are your actions?

I might cheat and add a 4a) which tends to yield good results…

4a) If that didn’t stop you, what would?

Now you could go away and use those questions on your own and perhaps get some good results. However you might not and if you don’t it’s because you are too close to the problem… having a face to face discussion allows the coach to read a bunch of non-verbal information to support what you are saying… in most cases the actual words that come out of your mouth reveal a tonne of information, and coupled with your non-verbal, give a good coach a very powerful representation of what is going on, including what you don’t actually say.

For example, look out for people shaking their head when they are answering a question, now that could mean incongruence (they don’t agree with their spoken words), it could also mean that they are weighing up options represented auditorily (is that a word?) in each ear, or it could mean something else which has a context related to other things that they are saying. Clearly the first two could have considerable impact on the information offered verbally, and all this stuff and more you miss when you’re not face to face.

So my view is really that coaching isn’t a commodity ready for the internet… there’s no formula for people’s problems, so no expert system can be programmed (although I bet Richard Bandler has thought about it). Lots of people get coached by friends, families and coworkers every day. There’s no need for a website to replace this. Let’s spend MORE time face to face than less, please.