Featuring:

• The four steps of anchoring
• The five keys to successful anchoring
• Pavlov’s Dog

plus a couple of useful acronyms to help you remember the steps and the keys

Listen and/or subscribe to this podcast via iTunes here (remember it can take a few hours for iTunes to grab the latest episode – if you subscribe it will appear as soon as it’s ready)

If you want to subscribe using something other than iTunes (e.g. if you have an Android phone), here’s the feed: http://coachingleaders.co.uk/feed/podcast/

Duration: 13:23

If you liked this podcast, please review it on iTunes!

And for more convenient listening on your smartphone or iPad, check out the free Practical NLP app for iOS and Android.

The post Practical NLP 27: Five Keys to Successful Anchoring appeared first on Coaching Leaders.

examples of visual predicates

This article follows ‘A Quick Introduction to Representational Systems‘, ‘Do you have a preferred representational system?‘, and ‘Characteristics of Primary Rep Systems‘ so read those first if you’re not familiar with the concept of rep systems in NLP.

The representational systems we are using to think with at any given moment show up in the words that we use. These are often referred to as ‘predicates’ in the NLP jargon, using ‘predicate’ in the sense of implying something, in this case that a particular representational system is in use.

You can listen out for the dominant sensory words in what a person is saying and use words from the same representational system when you reply. If you use visual words to a ‘visual’ person – by which I mean ‘a person with a strong preference for the visual representational system’, it’s easier for them to understand because they don’t have to translate from another system. This is another way to gain rapport, because you will sound more like the other person.

Where two people are using different rep systems, there’s an extra obstacle to communication, because each person has to unconsciously translate what the other person is saying into their own preferred rep system in order to process it. And like any translation, information can get lost. Here’s a consultant meeting a client:

Consultant: Well first I feel I need to say thanks for inviting me. Now I understand the business has hit a sticky patch – maybe you can lay out for me what the problems are?

Client: Yes, we’re hoping you can shed some light on it for us. We’re seeing storm clouds gathering on the horizon and we can’t see our way past them at the moment.

Consultant: Well, as soon as I can get a grasp of the situation, we’ll knock together some plans that you can carry out as soon as we get them to where they feel workable.

Client: Let me outline it for you – we just can’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Consultant: Yes, that must be very stressful for you. I’ll feel a lot better if you just help me get a handle on it.

Client: (impatient) I’m trying to show you the big picture here…

The client is thinking: I thought consultants were supposed to be bright, but this one seems really dim.  What do I have to do, draw him a diagram?

The consultant is thinking: Hmm, the client is resistant. Tough sell…

So what rep systems was each one using? Can you get a handle on the consultant’s rep system? And the client’s rep system should be blindingly obvious as well…

If you were the consultant, what could you have done that would have made that communication go better? I’m pretty sure you were saying vary your rep system to match the clients. And if you weren’t saying it, I know you were thinking it (that’s called a mind read in the Meta Model, by the way – we’ll get to that in a later article).

If you are talking to a group of people, or writing a report which may be read by many people, the chances are that your audience will contain people with different preferred representation systems. So what could you do to achieve greater rapport in that situation? And… I’m guessing that you said ‘use words from all the rep systems in your presentation’. It’s a good idea anyway – it will make your presentations more interesting to listen to. And especially if you yourself have a strong preference for one rep system – which we’re about to find out – use a variety of representational systems in your communication.

This is not just about words, because there are other ways of communicating. You can appeal to the visual sense through the use of pictures, and using channels or environments for your communication that look nice. This can make a huge difference to customer experience, especially in the retail market and online.

In 2006, Myspace was the most popular online social networking site. At its peak in 2007, it was valued at $12 billion. And then it started losing members to Facebook, in huge numbers.  When you compare the design of the two sites as they were then, it’s not surprising. Because Myspace users could customise their profile pages any way they wanted, most of them looked hideously cluttered, with loud colours and horrible fonts. The clean, uncluttered layout of the Facebook site was much easier on the eye.

In 2011, with declining user numbers, Myspace was finally sold for $35m. And the only group it’s still popular with – is musicians – although it’s now relaunched with a cleaner interface at a time when Facebook is annoying a lot of its users, so who knows what the future will bring?

If you are holding an important meeting or training course, you might want to consider the room from the point of view of each rep system in turn. Does the room look good? Any litter, shabbiness or untidiness will glare out to strongly visual people. Natural light is good, and if you have some fresh flowers in the room, you will also appeal to the olfactory channel.

Is the room quiet? If you’re using music to enhance the mood, or bear in mind that for auditory people it can get in the way of what you’re saying. If you’re using it on a training course, as some Accelerated Learning enthusiasts like to do, it may or may not enhance learning as is claimed, but it could definitely interfere with the thought processes of auditory thinkers.

And consider the room from a kinesthetic point of view. Is it comfortable? Is it too warm or too cold? And does it feel welcoming and pleasant.

Finally, give some consideration to putting yourself in the shoes of the classic “Auditory Digital” processor (the person who thinks in words and numbers rather than feelings, sounds or images, and is who thinks logically and systematically). What they are going to care about is: does your presentation make sense?

Visual	Auditory	Kinaesthetic
picture clear sight see light focus perspective vision dark draw outlook preview paint sparkle flash snapshot dawning shine colour diagram	hear clear music rhythm loud in tune sound overtone tell sing quiet voice tempo unheard of harmony ringing counterpoint rumble rattle tone	grasp handle feel rough smooth slippery hurt comfortable hold warm slap prickly downhill rock heavy lift stuck vibration push sink

Visual	Auditory	Kinaesthetic
An eyeful Appears to me Beyond a shadow of a doubt Bird’s eye view Catch a glimpse of Clear cut Dim view Draw me a diagram Get a perspective on Get a scope on Hazy Idea Horse of a different colour In light of In person In view of Looks like Make a scene Mental image Mental picture Mind’s eye Naked eye Paint a picture See to it Short sighted Showing off Sight for sore eyes Staring off into space Take a peek Tunnel vision Under your nose Up front Well defined	Afterthought Blabbermouth Clear as a bell Clearly expressed Call on Describe in detail Earful Give an account of Grant an audience Heard voices Hidden message Hold your tongue Idle talk Inquire into Keynote speaker Loud and clear Manner of speaking Pay attention to Power of speech Purrs like a kitten Rings a bell State your purpose Tattle-tale To tell the truth Tongue-tied Tuned in/tuned out Unheard of Utterly Voiced an opinion Well informed Within hearing Word for word	All washed up Boils down to Chip off the old block Come to grips with Control yourself Cool/calm Firm foundations Get a handle on Get a load of this Get in touch with Get the drift of Hand in hand Hang in there Heated argument Hold it! Hold on! Hothead Keep your hair on Kick it into touch Knock it on the head Know-how Lay cards on table Pain-in the neck Pull some strings Sharp as a tack Slipped my mind Smooth operator Start from scratch Stiff upper lip Stuffed shirt Too much of a hassle Topsy-turvy

The post NLP: How to Identify Primary Representational Systems from the Words People Use appeared first on Coaching Leaders.

We also guide you through a simple exercise where you can set yourself up a resource anchor so you can feel more resourceful any time you want.

Listen and/or subscribe to this podcast via iTunes here.

If you want to subscribe using something other than iTunes (e.g. if you have an Android phone), here’s the feed: http://coachingleaders.co.uk/feed/podcast/

Duration: 08:12

If you liked this podcast, please review it on iTunes!

And for more convenient listening on your smartphone or iPad, check out the free Practical NLP app for iOS and Android.

The post Practical NLP 26: Give Yourself A Resource Anchor appeared first on Coaching Leaders.

some kinaesthetic sensory predicates

A quick reference for NLP students: recognising the characteristics of primary representation systems, which can also give you some ideas about what each rep system is good for.

This article follows on from ‘A Quick Introduction to Representational Systems‘ and ‘Do you have a preferred representational system?‘, so read those first if you’re not familiar with the concept of rep systems.

Please remember this is not about putting people into boxes and saying “This person is a Visual” or “I’m an Auditory” – we use all of our rep systems pretty much all the time. Sometimes we are using one modality more than the others, and some (not all) people have a strong preference for using one or two of them more than the others.

People may move into using more of a given rep system when it’s appropriate to the task they’re doing. For example, when visiting an art gallery, most people will be using the visual modality more than the auditory (and if they don’t, they will not get as much from the experience).

So you can take this article as a quick and dirty guide to what’s happening when a person is operating primarily in a particular modality.

Visual

• Memorise by seeing pictures
• Have trouble remembering verbal instructions
• Tend to stand up straight, breathe from the top of the chest
• Prefer to stand back so they can see you
• Interested in whether things ‘look good’
• Tend to move, think and talk faster

Usually they will be nicely dressed and well groomed, and their desk will be tidy – they don’t like clutter.

Auditory (‘hearing’ in everyday English)

Easily distracted by noise – I used to work in an office with designers, and we had a constant battle over the radio. They kept turning it up, I kept turning it down because it interfered with the auditory processing I was doing to get my report to sound right.

• Learn by listening
• Can repeat things back to you easily
• Breathe from middle of chest
• Tone of voice very important
• Interested in whether things ‘sound right’
• Like to be close enough to hear you

Kinaesthetic (‘Feeling’ and/or ‘touch’ and/or ‘emotions’ in everyday ‘English’)

• Often talk and breathe slowly
• Respond to physical rewards and touch
• Memorise by doing or walking through things
• Breathe from abdomen
• Interested in whether things ‘feel right’
• Like to be close enough to touch you

They will dress for comfort rather than looks. They will probably arrange their office so that everything is in easy reach, even if it looks untidy – they won’t even be aware of that unless it’s pointed out to them.

Auditory Digital (‘Internal dialogue’ or ‘logical thought’ in everyday English)

• A lot of internal dialogue
• Memorise by steps, procedures, sequences
• Interested in whether something ‘makes sense’
• Can exhibit characteristics of other systems
• Will often be leaning back (dissociated)

For an extreme example of someone with a strong ‘Auditory Digital’ preference from popular culture, look no further than Dr Sheldon Cooper in The Big Bang Theory.

In the next article, we’ll find out how to recognise the representation system someone is primarily operating in (at that time) from the words they use.

The post NLP: Characteristics of Primary Representation Systems appeared first on Coaching Leaders.

Featuring:

• Why emotions are not the enemy of reason
• Why you need emotions to make decisions
• A focusing exercise to help you increase your self-awareness

Duration: 14:56

Also feature’s Daniel Goleman’s four-quadrant model of Emotional Intelligence:

Listen and/or subscribe to this podcast via iTunes here.

If you want to subscribe using something other than iTunes (e.g. if you have an Android phone), here’s the feed: http://coachingleaders.co.uk/feed/podcast/

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The post Practical NLP 25: Emotional Intelligence appeared first on Coaching Leaders.

- Alfred Korzybski
Polish-American philosopher and scientist, creator of the theory of ‘General Semantics’, big influence on NLP, and author of Science and Sanity

Image of Alfred Korzybski from Wikipedia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The post Alfred Korzybski on belief and skepticism appeared first on Coaching Leaders.

Where the idea came from

Recently one of my favourite writers, Iain Banks, revealed that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and was unlikely to live beyond a year. Naturally, his fans flooded the message board on his website with good wishes.

Today Banks has released another statement thanking the fans for their good wishes and  saying how surprised he was to find he was so much loved:

“Good grief! – what an outpouring of love, affection and respect. I honestly had no idea,” wrote the author. “Discovering the sheer extent and depth of the feelings people have expressed on the message board over the past two weeks has been truly astounding.

I feel treasured, I feel loved, I feel I’ve done more than just pursue the craft I adore and make a living from it, and more than just fulfil the only real ambition I’ve ever had – of becoming a professional writer. I am deeply flattered and touched, and I can’t deny I’ve been made to feel very special indeed.”

Banks speculated that every author has actually “engendered more love out there than we think we have, and it’s only the fact that I’ve been able to pre-announce my own demise that has allowed me to realise my portion of that love in full while I’m still around to appreciate it”.

He also wondered if every author has “engendered more love out there than we think we have, and it’s only the fact that I’ve been able to pre-announce my own demise that has allowed me to realise my portion of that love in full while I’m still around to appreciate it” and says he is going to start showing his appreciation to the authors who have meant a lot to him, before it’s too late.

Which got me thinking – how would you know who admires you, loves you, or values you, or whose lives you have changed… unless they tell you?

Try this

Take a tip from Iain Banks – if you admire someone or they’ve helped you change your life, don’t keep your admiration a secret. Tell them!

They aren’t psychic (probably) and people often underestimate how valued they are, so the only way people are going to know they’ve made a difference to you is if you tell them.

This is worth doing in a management context as well – I’ve mentioned before the research showing that people feel more motivated when they get to see the difference their work makes to others. So as well as sharing when you appreciate someone, what if you could make it easier for them to see the positive difference they are making to other people?

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Photo of Iain Banks by Tim Duncan from Wikipedia

The post How to deepen your connections to the people you love and admire appeared first on Coaching Leaders.

As I disagreed with nearly all her policies when she was in power, my younger self would be amazed to find me writing an article headed ‘Emotional Intelligence of Mrs T’. Like many people in the UK, I tended to think of her as ‘The Iron Lady’ – unbending, not caring about the people and communities hurt by her policies, and completely convinced of her own rightness.

So when I read the Guardian’s live blog of the Parliamentary tributes to her this week, I was surprised to find myself quite moved by some of the personal anecdotes about her life, particularly the stories of her kindness to individuals that worked for her. It is worth looking at how she conducted her career in terms of the components of Daniel Goleman’s model of Emotional Intelligence: self-awareness, self-management, relationship awareness (noticing and understanding emotions in others), and relationship management (social and leadership skills).

Self-Awareness

One of the most-used skills of the politician is to dissemble – to tell people what you think they want to hear, whether you actually believe it or not. Thatcher generally was the opposite of this kind of politician; she actually believed in what she was saying, and spoke from her beliefs even when she knew they would be unpopular. In the longer term this worked in her favour, as it developed her reputation as a ‘conviction politician’.

In contrast to the content of her message, she was quite prepared to change the style of her delivery in order to remove obstacles to being heard. She came from a ‘respectable middle class’ background, growing up above her father’s grocery shop in provincial Grantham – what would be regarded as ‘humble beginnings’ in the Conservative party that she joined in the 1940s. Financed by her businessman husband Denis, she presented herself as a conventional upper-middle class ‘Tory lady’, nicely but modestly dressed, in order to impress party officials and be regarded as a safe choice for a parliamentary candidate.

Later, when she became leader of the Conservative party, social deference in British society was ebbing away, and appearing too ‘posh’ would alienate voters. Her presentation returned to the more modest ‘Grantham housewife’ in order to appeal to the lower-middle and working class potential Tory voters.

Famously, she was prepared to listen to her advisers when they suggested that her voice needed to become softer, to seem more approachable to voters, and lower in pitch, to convey authority. You can hear the difference between the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ in this clip:

One quality often thought to contribute to self-awareness is having a sense of humour about oneself. In this area, at least, we can say that Mrs Thatcher seemed to be deficient, as she showed little sign of having a sense of humour about anything. We can infer this from her delivery of the jokes that her speechwriters occasionally saddled her with; and even more from her inadvertent double-entendres.

Self-Management

Any politician on the way up in a democracy needs to develop excellent self-management skills, to cope with the many rebuffs, snubs and reverses. This would be particularly true for an ‘outsider’ – which as a woman in the postwar Conservative party she was. The film ‘The Iron Lady’ and TV drama ‘Margaret Thatcher: The Long Walk to Finchley’ give an idea of the kind of obstacles she must have faced from sexism and snobbery.

An essential component of emotional self-management is persistence. Margaret Thatcher worked tirelessly, first as a schoolgirl to better herself, winning a scholarship to secondary school and becoming head girl; then at university, winning another scholarship to Oxford and becoming president of the university’s Conservative Association.

She was the Conservative party’s youngest and only female candidate in the 1950 and 1951 general elections, before finally being selected for the safe Conservative seat of Finchley in 1959. Along the way she had two children and qualified as a barrister.

By some accounts in her early career she was sometimes nervous of speaking in public or meeting important people, but never showed it. Her habit of dominating a conversation or interview, in a way that few other politicians have managed, may have been to some extent a cover-up for nerves.

Perhaps the only time the facade of Thatcher’s emotional self-management cracked was when she was deposed as leader of the Conservative party, and appeared on the steps of No. 10 Downing St. in tears.

Empathy and Relationship Management

This is where Mrs Thatcher’s career holds the most lessons for leaders. As Andrew Sparrow points out in his Guardian piece, “Thatcher (like most people who get to the top in politics) succeeded partly because she was good at managing people“. The tributes from parliamentarians who knew her contain many examples of small kindnesses, unexpected letters of condolence, and support shown to people around her.

The example that sticks in my mind was the story told by Sir Tony Baldry MP:

“Patrick Nicholls, a junior minister, had to resign from Thatcher’s government after being arrested for a driving offence. He was very depressed. But he was told to be in the division lobby at a certain time, and Thatcher made a point of going up to him and going through the lobby with him arm in arm, as a very public show of support.”

Sparrow suggests that these kindnesses are examples of how hard she worked at cultivating loyalty from people she would need. I think there may have been more to it than the purely instrumental. For example, her bodyguard of many years revealed in a TV interview that before she became prime minister, she regularly used to cook for him and his colleagues in the evenings. She obviously knew how to treat people in her immediate circle in a way that inspired loyalty, and that she would show consideration for people even when, like the disgraced junior minister, they were not in a powerful position, suggests that her kindness came from the heart.

Famously, her empathy did not extend to people in the communities devastated by her abrupt restructuring of Britain’s industry, nor to the miners, ‘new age travellers’, gays and others who did not qualify as ‘one of us’. It was as if her leadership style needed enemies – including large swathes of society in her own country, which she identified as ‘the enemy within’ – to rally her people around her.

Mrs Thatcher was able to get substantial numbers of middle class and ‘aspirational working class’ people to vote Conservative for the first time because she shared their values, and could communicate with them in a way that the upper class Tory establishment could not (readers outside the UK may not be aware of how much perceptions of social class still play a part in UK politics).

Crucially, she could communicate with these people in a way that they could understand. A 2009 analysis of her speeches found them significantly lower in ‘conceptual complexity’ than those of other postwar British prime ministers and world leaders. Lack of complexity, from a persuasion point of view, is not a bad thing – read Drew Westen’s book The Political Brain to see how people are won over by emotion rather than logic and nuance in political speeches.

Another interesting aspect of Mrs Thatcher’s leadership was how her self-belief, a crucial asset in winning power and standing up to critics, snobs and sexists in her early days, gradually became a liability. It seems that she gradually came to suffer from ‘CEO Disease’ – the condition identified by Daniel Goleman where underlings lose the courage to give you information that they think you might not like, and you believe you are always right in the face of the evidence.

In the end, her insistence on the immensely unpopular ‘poll tax’, against the advice of some of the leading figures in her own party, gave the party grandees the excuse they needed to depose her.

Lessons

So, what emotional intelligence lessons for leaders can we draw from Mrs T’s reign?

1. Treat people well and have empathy for them. People will repay you with loyalty. At the same time, extending that empathy to everyone in your country or organisation, whether or not they agree with you, will allow you to be a leader who unites rather than divides (readers outside the UK may not be aware that many people in the UK, including whole communities in Scotland and the North of England, hated rather than admired Mrs Thatcher).
2. Be clear on what you stand for, and communicate it in a way that people can understand.
3. Manage your emotional state. If you overcome fear and keep going in the face of criticism, you can achieve things that others have decided are impossible.
4. Beware of ‘CEO Disease’. Listen to dissenting opinions and ‘don’t shoot the messenger’ who brings you bad news – if you dismiss them too abruptly, you will eventually have no-one prepared to tell you when you are wrong.
5. Don’t see the world in black and white terms. If you are stuck in ‘either/or’ thinking, it means you will have difficulty making sense of multiple perspectives that seem to disagree. This makes decision-making simpler, but you may end up making a decision that does not address the real situation. At its extreme, you end up with George W Bush’s “you’re either with us, or against us” which gives you no room for dialogue with people who do not share your perspective.

image of Margaret Thatcher from Wikimedia

The post The Leadership Emotional Intelligence of Margaret Thatcher appeared first on Coaching Leaders.

Note: unless you have trained in Time Line Therapy (or a similar process like Time-Based Techniques), this post probably won’t mean much to you!

I trained in Time Line Therapy (the trademarked Tad James version) when I was working as a hypnotherapist, and almost immediately started tweaking it to make it more user-friendly.

Tad’s process is the most powerful I’ve found for helping clients to let go of emotional baggage – *and* here are a couple of tweaks that I found make it even more effective. For all I know he’s added similar changes in now (I trained in TLT nearly 20 years ago).

1. When doing the ‘test drive’ of the time line, getting the client to imagine it and float above now, I add “or just stay where you are and let it sink away below you, whichever is easiest”.

The rationale is that a few clients will experience difficulty in floating up, or even get nervous of heights, so I get them to move the timeline instead. This may be linked to how they experience the timeline – as something moving or something fixed.

Some people will experience the timeline as something fixed that they move along, like a road (this metaphor shows up in expressions like in “We’re coming up to the summer holidays” or “Let’s move on”). Others may experience themselves as fixed and the timeline as moving, like a river (“The summer holidays are nearly upon us” or “The deadline is getting closer”).

2. I stopped using the ‘Position No. 1, Position No. 2′ wording. Reason being, it requires the client to remember where each position is. Assuming they can do that successfully (by no means a given), they would have to be maintaining a mental picture of the diagram of the positions – which puts them into a dissociated viewpoint. For floating up above the timeline to work, they have to be associated – so there’s a conflict there.

Instead, I describe verbally where they should be at each point in the process, taking care to use language that suggests an associated viewpoint.

3. I hardly ever use the ‘Emotions 2′ process – the one where they go straight down into the significant emotional event in order to get the learnings before floating above it. I haven’t found that it adds anything to the ‘Emotions 1′ process which is done dissociated, and it makes it still less likely that the client would be ‘ambushed’ by negative emotions in the event.

As I said, this won’t mean much to anyone who hasn’t trained in ‘official’ Time Line Therapy(tm) but I hope that those who have may find it useful. (If you are an NLP practitioner working in therapy, I would recommend attending a TLT training or similar from a trainer who knows what they are doing, as it’s the most effective process I have found for releasing emotional baggage rapidly and painlessly).

The post Therapy Tips For Time Line Emotional Clearing appeared first on Coaching Leaders.

I have something a bit different for you this week – it’s an extract from an NLP Master Practitioner course that I ran in Manchester in about 2009. It starts to introduce the concept of ‘modelling’ (or ‘modeling’ in American English) in NLP – a way of rapidly learning some ability from a person who is good at it and stripping that reproduction down to a ‘model’ that contains the essentials, in a way that allows the skill to be transferred to others.

It also looks at how calling someone ‘a genius’ is not very helpful in replicating their skills, and why you will get on much better if you look at what they are actually doing.

Also featuring:

• The ‘dormitive quality’ of a sleeping draft in Voltaire’s ‘Candide’
• What ‘genius’ originally meant
• Why teenagers learn martial arts quicker than grown men and women

Apologies for the sound quality (though everything is audible and I’ve cleaned the sound up as much as I can) – it was recorded on a fairly primitive camcorder.

If you’re new to NLP, here’s a couple of words and names that are mentioned which you might not catch if you’re not familiar with them:

Nominalisations – these are words which refer to actions and processes as if they were things, and so they take a lot of the life out of language if they are used a lot. You can usually recognise them because most nominalisations are dry, abstract, long words, derived from Greek or Latin. There are some great examples of nominalisations from a government web site here.

Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, and Milton Erickson – these are the three ‘genius therapists’ whose skills Richard Bandler and John Grinder modelled in the course of creating NLP.

Duration: 8m43s

Listen and/or subscribe to this podcast via iTunes here.

If you want to subscribe using something other than iTunes (e.g. if you have an Android phone), here’s the feed: http://coachingleaders.co.uk/feed/podcast/

If you liked this podcast, please review it on iTunes!

Photo of Albert Einstein from Wikipedia

The post Practical NLP 24: What Is ‘Genius’? appeared first on Coaching Leaders.