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?
