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Are you overlooking the difference you're making to others?

Reading Kevin Powell's appreciation of Don Cornelius, creator and host of the great 70's TV show 'Soul Train', I was moved by the closing sentence: 

"The ultimate tragedy is that I doubt whether this man ever completely grasped how much joy and sunshine he had brought to others in his lifetime."

It got me thinking: how would you know how much of a difference you have made to others? Occasionally, on Facebook or wherever, someone who attended one of my NLP courses mentions in passing how they've turned some aspect of their life completely around as a result. But for that chance remark, I would never have known about it - and yet, it's tremendously motivating when I do.

Particularly when you work for yourself, it's sometimes hard to get feedback on how much of a difference you are making. This may be especially true in the UK - Brits aren't given to gushing. And, of course, some of the changes that people make, on a course, during coaching, or as a result of therapy, may not become fully apparent until some time later.

Research suggests that people feel more motivated when they get to see the difference they make to customers and end-users - see this article by Adam Grant in the Harvard Business Review for example. Positive reinforcement is very important to keep you doing the right things - as readers of Karen Pryor's great book Don't Shoot The Dog! The New Art Of Teaching And Training will know.

During tough times, this kind of motivating feedback can make all the difference to your ability to persist - and yet that's just the time when it's easiest to forget that you are making a difference and that your contribution is valued by others.

So, here are a couple of questions you may want to explore:

1. If you manage a team, what can you do to help your people stay aware of the the difference they are making to end users? 
2. On a personal level, what can you do to find out where you have made a positive difference?

Platforms like Facebook and Twitter make it a lot easier to stay in touch with your customers and/or students. Quite apart from the effect on your motivation, sales experts tell us that existing customers are much more likely to buy from you, so it's a good idea to connect with them to remind them that you are still there.

Let's turn this around and look at the people whom you appreciate for the difference they've made to you. I like to think I'm a fairly demonstrative person, but I'm sure that there are some people who don't realise how much of a difference they have made to me - how could they, if I don't tell them? So, the final question:

3. What could you do to let people know that they have made a difference to your life or your business?

An NLP view of 'genius' + 3 minute introduction to modelling

The concept of 'genius' as usually thought of gets in the way of discovering how exceptional people get great results! 

Here's a different and perhaps more useful way of looking at the concept of 'genius'. This is a clip from the Modelling component of the Coaching Leaders NLP Master Practitioner course in 2009. It also features a very brief description of what 'modelling' in NLP is about, and a very minimal Bruce Lee impression.

Very relaxed with a great small group and some dodgy camera work. Note the flipchart stand's homage to the Haçienda nightclub, highly appropriate since the course was in Manchester.

'Growth' vs 'Fixed' mindsets - and why it's important to have a 'growth' mindset

Anyone interested in personal development will have come across the Henry Ford quote "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right." This quote is so often repeated because it encapsulates an essential truth - that self-belief is important to performance. 

 

But it also overlooks an even more important principle discovered by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck - that what really makes the difference is not your belief in your current abilities and attributes, but whether you believe those abilities and attributes (like intelligence or 'character') are fixed or that they can be improved.

 

Dweck has been researching mindset, performance and motivation for 40 years. Her key finding is that if you believe your intelligence and talent are fixed (what she calls a 'fixed' mindset), you main motivation will be to look good and you will avoid challenges and feedback that might tarnish your image; whereas if you believe you can develop your ability (a 'growth' mindset), you will value learning, relish challenges, welcome feedback and keep going through setbacks.

 

The fixed/growth mindset distinction has a lot of useful implications for management, parenting, education, and personal development. We'll look at some of these in future articles. For now, there's an excellent graphical summary of the idea by Nigel Holmes, and this article from the Stanford Alumni Magazine is a good introduction to Carol Dweck's work.  

 

Plus, here's a short video interview with Carol Dweck where she explains the origin of her curiosity about the two mindsets: 

 

So how does Henry Ford's famous dictum "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't, you're right" fall short?

 

Here's how: with a fixed mindset, belief that 'you can' is a fragile construct. If your confidence is based on your ability, and you believe that ability is fixed, then when you hit a setback - as inevitably happens from time to time - it's going to pull the rug out from under you. "I must not be so smart after all, if I failed at this". When that happens, a person flips from believing "I can" to "I can't" very easily. 

 

This doesn't happen with a growth mindset. If you have a growth mindset, you treat setbacks as a cue to put more effort in. Dweck and her collaborator Carol Diener found that some children with a growth mindset didn't label their failures as setbacks at all - as Diener says in the Stanford Magazine article:

“Failure is information—we label it failure, but it’s more like, ‘This didn’t work, I’m a problem solver, and I’ll try something else.’”

Or in the words of the NLP principle, "There is no failure - only feedback."

Want to explore this further? Books by Carol Dweck:

Martin Luther King on hope and disappointment

Image from WikipediaYesterday was MLK Day in the USA. Not surprisingly, there were many inspiring quotes flying around Facebook. This was one of my favourites:

"We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” 

More quotes by Dr Martin Luther King Jr here - they are worth taking a couple of minutes to read. 

How to clarify your values (2): Establish your hierarchy

Following on from the previous instructions on how to clarify your values for a particular area of your life, here's the next step that's vital to do before you set any personal goals - discover the order of importance of your values. This is another extract from my book, Achieve Your Goals (Dorling Kindersley 2006) which at the time of writing has all 5-star reviews (11 of them) on Amazon.co.uk!

 

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Some values will be more important to you than others. The most important values will be the ones that have the most say in how you use your time, so the next step in clarifying your priorities for your chosen area will be to discover your values hierarchy.

 

The first value that came to mind in the previous exercise may well not be the most important. In fact, some of the 'submerged' values that came at the end of the list may be the ones that turn out to be most important to you.

 

Eliciting your values hierarchy is simple. Just take your list of values for a given area and ask:

 

"If I could only have one of these values in <area>, which one would it have to be?"

 

When you have identified that value, ask:

 

"If I could only have one more, which one would it be?" - and so on, until you have all the values in order.

 

Tips for getting the best from this process:

• If it's hard to decide which is the more important of two values, use this method:

"You can have either <one value> or <the other value> but not both. Which does it have to be?"

• You may find that a value in your initial list turns out to be the same as, or a slightly different aspect of, another value. If this happens, merge them - so "respect" and "recognition" might become "respect/recognition".

• You can write the values on sticky notes to make it easier to re-order them. This also makes the process more physically interactive, so you may feel a deeper connection with it.

An example, using values for "Work and Career":

 

A special case: Money as a value

If "Money" comes out at the top of the list, you may need to do some additional work on your list. Ideally, money would be a "means" value, one that is useful because having it helps to fulfil more abstract "ends" values. For example, having money might allow you to have more security, or freedom, or make more of a contribution. 

 

Money does not make a good "ends" value. If someone has money at the top of their values list, they could end up with a pile of cash that means nothing to them.

 

Your priorities can change

The values that are most important to you in a particular area of your life may change over time as your circumstances change. For someone who is heavily in debt, money may be high on their scale of values. Once they have a comfortable amount of cash in the bank, money would probably be less important and other values might move up the list.

 

The values hierarchy that you have just elicited is a snapshot of where you are at this point in time.

 

Try this out, and let me know how you get on by leaving a comment below!

 

Next up: How to check for clashes in your values

 

How to clarify your values (3): Check for Clashes

This article follows on from part 1 (how to elicit your values) and part 2 (how to discover your values hierarchy). What follows is an edited extract from my book, Achieve Your Goals (Dorling Kindersley 2006).

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Conflicting values (for example, 'adventure' versus 'security' in your career) are a recipe for dilemmas, and for feeling 'stuck' or 'torn in two'. Here is how to check that each value is compatible with each of the others:

1. Take the lowest value on your prioritised list and check it against the one above it. Can you have both? If you feel that these two values cannot coexist, make a note of the clash. Continue to check the lowest value against each other value, all the way up the list.


2. Then take the next lowest value, and check it against each value above it in turn.


3. Continue with the next lowest value until you have checked each one against all the values above it.

Alternatively, you could use a matrix structure, as with this example using the previous "Work and Career" list:

In this case the person feels that there is at least a potential clash between enjoyment and money. This could just be a reminder that the person needs to consider carefully how both values can be fulfilled, or it could indicate a head-on clash between the two values which needs to be resolved.

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Why not share how you got on with this exercise by leaving a comment below?

Next up: How to check whether your motivation is 'Towards' or 'Away-from', and why it matters

Useful strategy-tracking template

I found this helpful 'strategy tracking tool' (actually an old-fashioned paper form) by Kaihan Krippendorf, author of Outthink The Competition. It's simple, easy to use, and gratifyingly close to what I used to teach on my 'Create The Life You Want' courses. 

Get it, and other free tools, here.

What you absolutely must do before making any New Year's resolutions: Clarify your values (1)

Most people have had the experience of setting New Year's Resolutions and not sticking to them. One of the biggest reasons for failure is setting resolutions which you're not 100% aligned with. If your resolutions are not aligned with your values, your motivation won't last. You may even find yourself doing things that sabotage the goals you thought you wanted.

So, unless you are already absolutely, no-doubt-whatsoever, 100% clear about what's important to you, it's worth taking a little time to get clear about your values.

This is an edited extract from my book "Achieve Your Goals" (Dorling Kindersley 2006) which gives you step-by-step instructions on how to do this (NB the book has a lot more illustrations, diagrams, and general beautiful design):

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What are values?

Your values provide the motivating force behind your actions. They get you out of bed in the morning, and determine how you spend your time. If something is not important to you, you are not going to spend any time in pursuit of it.

Your values are also the criteria that you use to decide whether a particular action is right or wrong. They guide your decisions and provide meaning in your life. This guidance usually happens at a more or less unconscious level - you usually know if something is right or wrong without having to think about it too much. If you follow the guidance in this section to become explicitly aware of your values, you can use them as a checklist to evaluate any choices you are offered.

We acquire our values in the course of our upbringing, from our parents, peer groups, education, and the information we take in from the media. We also modify our values in the light of the conclusions we draw for ourselves from the events of our lives.

Values are abstract concepts (like fun, integrity, learning, or security) rather than particular things or actions. This means that they can be fulfilled in many different ways - you're not tied to one particular career choice, for example, because there may be many different careers that fulfil your values.

The values that are important to you in your life as a whole may play out with some variations in different contexts of your life. What's important to you in your career, for example, may be different from your priorities for relationships, or health and fitness.

Step 1: Finding your values for a particular area

Choose an area of your life (like, for example, Career, Relationships, or Finances) that you want to work on first and ask yourself:

"What is important to me about <area>?"

Write down the immediate answer that comes to mind. Then continue to ask:

"What else is important to me about <area>?"

You will end up with a list of around seven to ten values - maybe less, maybe more.

Tips for getting the best from this process

• The values you end up with should be abstract concepts. If the area you are looking at is "Work and Career" and once of your answers is something concrete like "a good company car", you need to find out what abstract value this is representing. This is easily done - just ask: "What is important about having a good company car?" Continue to ask the "What is important?" question until you get up to an abstract value rather than a thing or an activity. In this case, for some people, it might be "recognition"; for others it might be "reward".

• You may find that you come out with four or five values in rapid succession and then your mind goes blank. These are all the values that were at the forefront of your mind, but there are probably others that you are less consciously aware of but are equally strongly held. To unearth these, continue to ask: "What is important about <area>?" and listen for the answer.

• If your list of values includes a word like "satisfaction", "fulfilment" or "contentment", check what that word means to you. If it is what you would get if all the other values on the list were present, you can safely take it out. If it means something else to you, leave it in.

• This list should be about your values, rather than what anyone else thinks should be on the list. The more honest with yourself you are, the more valuable the list will be to you. If keeping other people happy is important to you in this context, then it deserves to be on the list as a value in its own right.

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Try this out, and why not share how you get on by leaving a comment below?

Next up: How to prioritise your values (but do this exercise first!)

Want to be a better communicator? Check the V.I.B.E.S.!

NLP Calibration: what to notice

Following on from earlier articles about calibration and calibration exercises, let's look at some of the changes you can calibrate in people's responses. This comes from NLP, but if you're at all interested in the 'relationship awareness' aspect of emotional intelligence, or in coaching, counselling, communication or influence, being aware of these external signs of changes in someone's internal state will be useful.

I've come up with the acronym VIBES to help you remember. Let's run through each letter in the acronym in detail.

V for Voice: There are many things that might change in someone's voice.

The tempo of the voice, which is the speed and also the rhythm, which might be smooth - or it could be - staccato! Generally, if someone gets more excited, their voice tends to speed up. Remember, we're looking for changes here, not making generalisations. We're not saying that people who talk faster are more excited than people who talk slowly.

Some people naturally think and talk faster than others - more about that in the next programme. However, if you notice someone's conversation speeding up, it's a pretty safe bet that something has caught their interest.

The volume of someone's voice - again, some people habitually talk quite loud, and others usually talk softly. But if you notice someone getting louder, or quieter, it's a sign that some change has happened on the inside.

Another thing you can pay attention to is the pitch of someone's voice - is it high or low, or getting higher or lower?

And you can notice the modulation of the voice - this is the way in which it goes up and down. Some people have very little modulation in their voice, others have beautifully modulated voices like an actor. If someone's voice gets flatter and less modulated, what could that indicate?

Another thing to notice is the timbre of the voice. This is the quality of the voice - it could be clear, or maybe a bit breathy, or nasal, or maybe a bit croaky. It can change a bit as people's emotional states change.

All of these together pretty much make up what's known as tone. I'm using 'tone' hear in the sense of the emotional message conveyed by the voice. You'll also see it sometimes used in NLP to mean the same as pitch - since we have a word for that already, I think it's more useful to use 'tone' in the everyday English sense - as in "Don't you take that tone with me young lady!"

Another thing you can notice is the type of words the person uses. That's a different kind of indicator from the non-verbal qualities we've been considering so far, so we'll get into how to do this and why it's useful in later articles.

I for Inclination of Spine (general posture and gesture)

This is actually body language in general - but I needed an 'I' for the acronym! The inclination of the spine is a good place to start though as it's easy to see.

So, is the person slumped or straight?

Are they leaning forwards, or backwards, or are they just upright?

Is their posture symmetrical, or leaning to the left or right?

Notice the general range and speed of their gestures - big gestures or small? Are they moving quickly or slowly?

And, getting more subtle now, notice any micro-muscle movements. For example, some people tense their fingers when they are angry, even if they don't go all the way to clenching their fists. Some facial expressions are very subtle and fleeting.

B for Breathing is a real indicator of state. Think of the difference in your breathing when you are tense, and when you are relaxed.

Notice the rate of breathing, and variations in that rate. Is it fast or slow?

The indicator of breathing rate that everyone thinks of is the chest rising and falling. In some people this isn't very obvious, especially if the breathing is quite slow or shallow - and of course there may be situations where it may not be appropriate to stare at someone's chest. There are other indicators, depending on how they are breathing - the stomach or shoulders rising and falling slightly, or even slight movements of the head.

Another sign to notice: how deep is the breathing? How much air are they taking in?

And where in their body is their breathing located? How far down does the breath go? Some people habitually do abdominal breathing, where their stomach pushes out as they breath in - you will be familiar with this if you've ever done yoga or tai chi; some people breathe more to the middle of their chest; and some people do what's called 'clavicular breathing' where they don't really breathe down past their shoulders - particularly if they are distressed.

E for eyes: There are also various changes in and around the eyes that you can notice. Pupil dilation or contraction, redness around the eyes, watering of the eyes, narrowing or opening wider, and blink rate are some of the changes you may notice. And, of course, the direction the eyes move in may tell us something about how that person is processing information moment to moment - more about this in the next programme.

Finally, S for Skin. The skin and the brain are intimately connected - in fact, both develop from the outer layer or ectoderm of the early embryo. We've known for a while that psychological stress can make skin conditions like psoriasis and dermatitis worse. For calibration, though, we are interested in more fleeting changes:

Changes in skin colour, which darkens or lightens according to how dilated the capillaries in the skin are.

Muscle tonus - how tense or relaxed the muscles are. This is particularly noticeable in facial expressions.

One aspect of muscle tonus is that the size of someone's lips can change, from plump and full to tightly compressed.

Skin may change from matt to more shiny, or vice versa, depending on how sweaty the person gets. 

And, of course, a person may get goose pimples - either from cold, or from extreme fear and excitement.

All or any of these changes may give you information about changes in a person's state, moment to moment.
Since everyone's reactions are individual to that person, it's best to notice how they correlate to other evidence you get about that person from their behaviour, rather than treating a particular change as always meaning one particular thing in every case.

For example, when people are talking to someone they are attracted to, their pupils tend to dilate; but just because someone is looking at you with dilated pupils, it doesn't always follow that they are attracted to you. It could be the poor light in the room, they could be thinking about someone else that they like, or they could be on medication. You don't know for sure until you have other behavioural evidence to back it up.

How to loosen up a problem in the process of identifying it - Richard Bandler's "Magic In Action"

NLP co-founder Richard Bandler used the process of problem elicitation as a way of loosening up the client's strategy for having the problem - see the transcripts of client sessions in his book 'Magic In Action', which I would say is essential reading for any therapist.

"I constantly joke with clients about their problems in order to cure them of seriousness, which is what locks the model down. You get serious, you get stuck. Humor is the fastest way to reverse this process. As soon as you can laugh about something, you can change it." - Richard Bandler

The object is to loosen up the client's model of the world, not to 'cure' the problem - although the client may let go of the problem during the process.

This is my take on what he's doing in the transcripts - I think of it as the "Teach Me How To Do It" process for want of a better name. In a nutshell, he's finding out (or 'eliciting' in NLP-speak) each step of their 'strategy' for having the problem (the mostly automatic series of steps they go through in their head in order to make the problem happen) and scrambling the strategy to give the client an exit route at each step - at the same time! 

NLP buffs will appreciate the little bits of jargon that I've used, everyone else can safely ignore them (or look them up).

1. Let the client describe the problem, at the same time establishing rapport and introducing humour. Use meta-model questions as needed to get when and where they run the problem.
   
   Their description will give you indications of their belief systems around the problem (modal operators, cause and effect patterns, complex equivalences).
   
   Note: Rapport and pacing is key to this process. If you get too funny too fast, the client  will think you are not taking them seriously.
   
    
2. Ask "If I had to fill in for you for a day, so one of the parts of my job would be to have the problem, what do I have to do? You're the expert - teach me how to do it... What's the first thing I have to do?"
   
   Note: This has two useful effects:
   
   a) the client was expecting you, the 'expert', to tell them what to do (and perhaps sit in judgement on their failings) - now they are cast in the empowering role of the expert, and you are merely the pupil
   
   b) it gives the client some distance from the problem - now it's happening to you, not them
   
    
3. Elicit each step of the strategy, but 'play dumb'. Mess up the submodalities of each step, like this:
   
   Client: "You've got to tell yourself  'Oh my God, he's had an accident on the way over'"
   
   You: "OK... No, I must be doing it wrong, I'm still not feeling anxious. Will it still work if I'm talking to myself in a quiet, calm voice?"
   
   Client: "No! You've got to say that to yourself in a loud, panicky voice!"
   
   You: "OK - so if I want to have this problem correctly, I have to avoid at all costs using a quiet, calm inner voice..."
   
   Note: When you play around with the submodalities, you are giving the client alternative ways out of the strategy at each step. 
   
   When you ask "Will it still work if I...?" the client has to try out the new version on themselves in order to answer the question. 
   
   If you were just to say "Try saying it to yourself in a quiet, calm voice" they might reject the suggestion without trying it first.
   
    
4. Keep eliciting until you have the whole of the strategy (i.e. you can reproduce the problem in yourself, as long as you use the client's submodalities for each step). Check if the client can still do the problem, and what has changed. 
   
   If you can make the client laugh, you know you are getting somewhere.

By the end of this process you have the client's strategy for having the problem, and their 'map' of the problem has loosened up somewhat, maybe completely. At the very least this will make any later interventions easier.

Notice how the process elicits the problem strategy and scrambles it at the same time. It illustrates the thin line between elicitation and installation.

This process would fit into any therapy or coaching session that focuses on problem-solving (as opposed to solution-focused or Appreciative Inquiry approaches, which are going to be focusing on what's working well). With a bit of imagination you could probably use it in other areas such as management consulting.

Why not leave a comment below and let us know how you got on with using this approach? 

What you need to know about your unconscious mind

Your unconscious mind is on your side

It wants to serve and protect you. Even when the objective result of what it does is harmful, it believes it's doing it for your own greater good.

Most of the time, your unconscious mind is in charge

We go through life mostly on 'autopilot'. The conscious mind can look ahead to future consequences, plan, and make up rationalisations, but it's your unconscious mind that acts in the moment. (for more about this, see You are the elephant, you are the rider' or read Jonathan Haidt's book 'The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science'.

Your unconscious mind wants to do what you ask of it

If you don't give it any instructions, it will take its orders from orders from elsewhere - advertising, peer pressure, parental 'programming'. And, it will take the line of least resistance and do exactly what you ask of it and no more - so be careful what you ask it to do.

Your unconscious mind works with feelings, images and metaphors, rather than logic, words and abstract concepts

The unconscious mind will only respond to abstract concepts (ie nominalisations) when it has examples of those concepts to work with.

Your unconscious mind learns through intensity of emotion, and through repetition

Your unconscious mind does not process negatives

Negation is a logical, conscious-mind concept. So when someone says "Don't worry", the unconscious mind hears "Worry".

Follow this instruction: Don't think of a blue rhinoceros!

A simple exercise to develop your calibration skills

Your persuasion task for today (should you choose to accept it) is to get someone to work with you in practising reading another individual. This will be easy, because they get to sharpen their skills too. Here's a simple exercise you can do:

1. Ask your partner to think of someone they dislike. Notice their facial expression, eye movements, breathing, and any postural changes. You may find it easier to pick up information beyond the facial expression if you go slightly into peripheral vision.
2. Now ask your partner to think of someone they really like, and observe them again. You will probably notice some differences.
3. Now, ask them to think of one or the other, without telling you which. See which set of cues you observe, and tell them which one they are thinking of. You may be surprised at how easily you can 'read their mind'. If your reading wasn't accurate, go back to calibrating - first as they think of the person they dislike, then the one they like. Do this as many times as you need to in order to make an accurate reading.

If they want, swap roles so they can have a go too.

In our live NLP Practitioner training we do a more developed version of this exercise - and if you are a trainer and you want step by step instructions to this and many other exercises around rapport and sensory acuity, you can download 15 Free NLP Exercises here.

Why 'Calibration' is important in communication

Image by Dora Mitsonia at sxc.huNLP jargon alert! "Calibration". What on earth does this mean?

You know if you have a pair of old fashioned kitchen scales, you have to make sure they are set to zero before you measure something. That way, you are starting off from an accurate baseline so you know that when you put the item on the scales, the weight it shows is accurate. When you do that, you are calibrating the scales.

In NLP, it's a similar concept. It's about noticing changes in another person's responses in an ongoing interaction with them. You would notice their posture, voice tone, facial expression, and micro muscle movements at the start of your interaction, which gives you a baseline reading. Then you monitor any changes in those as the interaction continues.

This is essential to being able to use NLP successfully. It's also essential in successful communication. A bad communicator will prejudge or imagine the internal responses of others - "hallucinate" them as we say in NLP. A good communicator learns to read the external signs of these internal responses, in real time, as the interaction goes on.

For example, let's say a manager has noticed that every time a team member talks about feeling 'unhappy', a crease appears between his eyebrows, his lips narrow, and his shoulders come up slightly. If at some time later, the manager observes the team member doing this in a team meeting when she's announcing some new task, that gives her evidence that he is not happy with this new requirement and she can respond appropriately.

The more you pay attention to the other person, the easier it becomes to read their responses. Of course, if you have the opportunity to observe them over a period of time, as with a work colleague or family member, this gives you more information to work with - but you have to pay attention.

You may have worked with people who seem to pay very little attention to people around them. Sometimes they don't even look at the person as they are having a conversation. You could pick up more information about the people around you in a minute than others notice in several months - if you pay attention. 

What is 'Sensory Acuity' in NLP?

Image by Dora Mitsonia at sxc.huSensory acuity in NLP is about paying more attention to what's going on. It's not about actually making your eyesight better so you don't need glasses - although there is at least one NLP-based course that does do that, and I know at least one person who says he got significant improvements from it. No, it's about noticing more by paying attention to the information that was there all along.

People give out huge amounts of information from moment to moment. Changes in their emotional states and in what they are thinking about cause changes in their physiology. We can notice these changes - if we bother to look for them.

Sometimes these changes are subtle, sometimes they are so obvious that you'll wonder how you missed them previously.

To take some of the more obvious ones - when people are relaxed, the capillaries near the surface of their skin dilate, so they get more flushed. When people are interested in something, their pupils tend to dilate and they tend to lean forwards - when they lose interest they tend to lean back.

These are generalisations, of course. In NLP, we're not talking about generalisations such as body language experts will give you - although some of those generalisations are true enough of the time to be well worth knowing about.

Rather, we're talking about noticing changes in the outwards signs of inner state changes and processing - the 'behavioural manifestations of internal representations' as you will sometimes hear it referred to in NLP. 

Why is this worth noticing? Because if you notice a change in someone's physiology or a shift in their voice tone that's telling you that some sort of interior change has happened. If you observe it consistently happening in a particular situation, or in response to something that you're doing, you can get an idea of what it means. The more you notice, the better you will get at 'reading' people.

Also, the more you practice paying attention, the more you can track these subtle changes in people's state with your unconscious mind. Imagine gauging exactly the right time to ask someone on a date, introduce a new idea, or close a sale. The more you notice about a person, the easier it is to do that.

And there's another reason that I'll mention in a later article...

NLP Presuppositions: an exercise

Now that the recent series of articles on the 'Presuppositions of NLP' is complete, here's an exercise that you can try at home, to really understand how relevant these presuppositions are to your life.

Pick three of these NLP presuppositions. They could be ones that particularly resonate with you, or you could just pick any three at random.

Now think of some challenge that you have - it could be at work or at home, it could be something that holds you back or more about how you are going to learn something or reach a particular target. And, by the way, if you don't have any challenges in your life, maybe you're not setting your sights high enough.

Take the first of the presuppositions and use it as a lens to look at the issue. What's different about the issue when you look at it from the viewpoint of this presupposition? What options does it open up? What does it make sense to do in the light of the presupposition?

Now repeat this exercise with the other two presuppositions. Notice what insights and learnings you get. The chances are that some of the insights you get will be more useful than others... so which insights are most useful to you? And what are you going to do differently as a result what you've learned?

Politics and psychology - test your moral foundations

Following on from the last article about the differences in psychology and brain structure between 'liberals' and 'conservatives', here's a fascinating video of a TED talk by Jonathan Haidt on the five moral values that form the foundation of our political outlook. 

Plus, he's set up a site (www.yourmorals.org) where you can take an assessment to find out how you compare to typical 'liberals' and 'conservatives' in the importance you ascribe to each of the five scales: 

1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity. 

In the interests of transparency, here's my score (in green): 

Politics, brain science, and organisational change

Photo of Occupy Wall Street crowd 2011 from Wikipedia taken by David ShankboneOr: Why does everyone love Occupy Wall Street when they hated the English rioters?

It's not every day that something useful comes out of a discussion, but in this case I think something has. 

During the recent riots in England, most of my Facebook contacts, who I had thought had a fairly liberal political outlook, surprised me by posting messages to the effect of 'get the Army onto the streets', 'break out the water cannon' and 'hanging is too good for them!' With a few exceptions, they turned out to be closet reactionaries. 

Or so I thought... because those very same people surprised me again when the Occupy Wall Street movement started up by posting supportive messages and sharing news releases, videos and tweets from the protestors. What on earth is going on? I posted a status update to that effect.

It drew a lot of comments. One of the commenters wondered if the political mood shifts to the right when a state of fear is created (bear in mind that many people in UK cities had rioters on or very close to the street where they lived). I decided to find out what research had been done in this area, and found a couple of very interesting studies.

One was from April this year. A study by Kanai et al. at University College London's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience found that the brain structures of 'conservatives' and 'liberals' (I'm using these terms as they are generally used in America, rather than referring to the UK political parties) are actually different.

Conservatives have larger amygdalas - an almond-shaped structure in the brain that is active in (and triggers) states of fear and anxiety. Liberals, by contrast, have more grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, an area of the brain that helps people cope with complexity. 

So - conservatives are driven by fear and perception of threat and like to keep things simple, while liberals are more open to new information and nuance. This probably won't surprise anyone, but this difference is supported by their brains being differently wired. 

We shouldn't assume that this means they are hardwired from birth, by the way. It could be that their different ways of thinking cause new connections to grow in those parts of the brain. This is known to happen with some other brain regions; for example, the hippocampus, a brain structure involved in memory, has been found to be larger than average in London taxi drivers, who have to memorize 'the knowledge' of pretty much every street in London before they can get their licence.

Other studies have suggested that right-wingers are happier than left-wingers (they are less upset by inequality because they believe that people generally get what they deserve) and that liberals are more creative than conservatives.

Another piece of research goes some way to explaining how people's responses to political events can switch from 'reactionary' (as in the responses to the riots) to mildly 'revolutionary' (as in the support for 'Occupy Wall Street'). 

A study in 2009 by psychologist Paul Nail at the University of Arkansas found that when normally liberal people are exposed to a psychological 'threat', such as injustice or reminders of their own mortality, they respond with "defensive conservatism" by seeking comfort in authority, order and tradition. So, a liberal may temporarily turn into a conservative if they can hear a riot going on in the next street, or even just watch it on the news.

What's the practical implication of this research if you are not actually running a country? Well, if you are aiming to bring about necessary change in your team or department, you need to be aware that the more stressed people feel about the change, the more resistant to change they will be and the less able to learn new patterns of behaviour.

As Appreciative Inquiry facilitators know, change requires a lot of positive emotion to be successful. So change is most likely to be successful when it starts from a position of building on strengths, rather than trying to root out and eliminate weaknesses. 

To focus on the shortcomings of current performance, or to present change as a leap into the unknown, however exciting, will tend to bring out the change-resisting, new-idea-blocking reactionary in your typical staff member.

Instead, get people to identify successes, what they are proud of, and what's already working, and improve results by doing more of that.

NLP Presuppositions (12): Any changes should increase choice and wholeness, and be evaluated in terms of ecology

Following on from the "Law of Requisite Variety", we can say that choice is better than no choice. The more options we have open to us, the more likely we are to be able to make the right choice for any given situation. Also, when conditions change, it's good to have the flexibility that additional options give us.

For example, a lot of independent trainers and consultants I know have seen a drop in their business in the last couple of years, where the old ways they used to get clients have stopped working. One way they could do something about that would be to pick up the phone and start calling prospects.

But they won't do it, because that behaviour is just not part of their repertoire and they don't feel it would be "them" - even though in some circumstances it may be the very best way to increase or even save their business.

If only they had that additional choice available to them - if they could do something different to what isn't working any more - they could start reaching more people and making their lives better (for great reframes around picking up the phone and cold calling, see my friend Gavin Ingham's blog).

So any changes we make should increase choice. Remember the presupposition that 'All behaviour is the best choice currently available'? By now you may be starting to see how these presuppositions fit together. You may remember that we used the example of smoking as a behaviour that a person's conscious mind might want to stop, but nevertheless they don't always find it easy to stop, because at the unconscious level they may be getting some payoff or benefit from it - 'secondary gain' as it's called in therapy.

When I ran a hypnotherapy practice, one of the clients told me about her brother, who had been to see one of those old-school hypnotherapists who specialised in smoking cessation and worked mostly through authoritarian hypnosis and - let's be frank - fear. He got the brother into trance, ran through his smoking cessation script, and near the end implanted this suggestion: "And if you ever pick up a cigarette again, you will find that you are smoking five times as much as you used to."

What could possibly go wrong? I think you may guess what happened next. The brother stopped smoking, but a few months later he was at a party, had a few drinks, and out of habit accepted a cigarette that someone offered him. Before he knew it, he was indeed back on the cigarettes again, smoking five times as many as he used to. Not an ideal solution.

The NLP approach to change accepts that any behaviour could be useful in some context, although the situations in which smoking would be the best choice are pretty rare. With this in mind, we aim to add better choices rather than take away or prohibit the problematic choice. So with smoking, part of what you might do is to establish what, if any, is the secondary gain from smoking, and help the person to generate better choices that they can use instead of smoking in those situations where previously they used to smoke.

If you have better options that give you the same or better payoffs as the old problem behaviour, but without the downside, of course you will always choose the better options - even though the previous behaviour is still available to you. Plus, you still have the previous behaviour in your set of choices if circumstances change and it becomes useful.

Change should also aim to preserve or increase wholeness. This principle originated from therapy, where - following Virginia Satir and Fritz Perls - the early NLP pioneers did a lot of work with the idea of 'parts' of someone's personality being responsible for problems, and talking directly to that part. They even got to the point of installing new parts. A side-effect of this can be that the more you treat the parts as real - rather than just convenient metaphors - the more of a life of their own they can take on. So before someone takes a decision, they have to sit down and listen to each part in turn, in the hope that they can all reach agreement.

I understand there are even some therapists in America - not NLP ones, I'm happy to say - who find that every single client has multiple personality disorder. If not when they start therapy, then by the time they leave.

In organisations, there are also costs involved with the old fashioned model where communication is mainly up and down, between managers and the people who report to them, rather than across the organisation between departments. Many organisations I've worked with in the UK, especially in the public sector, complain about 'siloisation', where staff in different departments don't know each other, don't communicate with each other, and the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. In the worst cases you get turf wars, withholding of knowledge, and departments competing for budgets, forgetting the big picture that they all work for the same organisation and are supposed to be working towards the same goals.

Any fragmentation increases costs and disrupts communication, so changes need to promote wholeness and heal unnecessary divisions.

Finally, change should be evaluated in terms of ecology - in other words, its wider effects. This is to make sure that the change is something you would still want when you look beyond the immediate context where its made - so if someone is thinking of taking a new job, for example, they should consider not just the step up and the extra money, but also commuting time, what hours they will be working, the impact on their time with their family, how closely the new job aligns with their values, and the opportunities it will give them to learn, along with many other areas.

The importance of state in changing minds - and four ways to work with it

I keep coming back to Seth Godin's article 'I changed my mind yesterday', about how hard it is to change people's minds when they have already decided and are determined not to change. I briefly blogged about it back in 2005 (Seth Godin on changing minds), but it deserves a bit more consideration - and now I think I can add something to Seth's original thoughts.

Seth describes how he was at the airport on standby, desperately needing to make his meeting in Buffalo. When someone ahead of him in the standby queue gets a seat, he offers her $100 to give him her seat and take the next flight, only 90 minutes later. She turns him down without a thought, as do the next two people. He doesn't get on the flight. 

Why weren't they open to this excellent offer of getting paid $65 an hour to read a novel? Because they'd had their hopes set on getting a seat on the earlier flight for an hour, and when they got it, they weren't going to give that up. They'd already made their minds up.

As Seth says, the same thing happens in business. 

"There’s no point whatsoever in having a meeting designed to elicit change if the attendees are insulated against changing their minds. Assuming you are surrounded by co-workers who are willing to try, it’s essential you go through exercises designed to loosen up the flip muscle.

"Ironically, the setting and tone of a conference room work to create precisely the opposite effect. Business meetings (and sales calls) are custom-made for failure. People walk in and are reminded (in an overwhelmingly Proustian way) that this is the place to stand your ground, this is the place where good arguments carry the day and build careers, and weak-kneed flip-floppers hurt their careers. When was the last time you changed your mind in a conference room?"

He suggests 2 ways you can combat this effect:

1. Pick an audience who are in the mood to 'flip' (change their minds) like people who have just moved to a new town, started a new job etc. This is excellent advice. Even more in a mood to 'flip' are people who are looking to change their job, buy a new car or whatever. 

When I was looking to get out of a day job that I hated, back in 1992 (it was in IT since you ask), I responded to an ad in a newspaper that turned out to be for a hypnotherapy course (although it was headed 'become a stress auditor'). It was a very expensive course (later on I found the content was pretty terrible too, but I had no standards to judge by back then) - but because I was definitely in the mood for a total career change, they didn't have much trouble signing me up for it.

2. "Start a cascade of small flips". Robert Cialdini's excellent book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" describes a psychology experiment by Freedman and Fraser' in the mid-60's found that householders were almost six times as likely to agree to have a large, ugly "Drive Safely" billboard on their front lawn if they had earlier been asked to display a three-inch-square "Be a safe driver" sign in their front window.

This was an example of Cialdini's 'Consistency Principle'. Displaying the small sign changed the self-image of the householders; once they'd put the small sign up, they started thinking  of themselves as public-spirited citizens and were much more likely to agree to the larger request in order to maintain consistency with their new self-images.

3. Now for what we can add to Seth's two recommendations. As he says in the quote above, the conference room is a place where "people walk in and are reminded (in an overwhelmingly Proustian way) that this is the place to stand your ground". If you're familiar with NLP, you'll have identified that 'overwhelmingly Proustian way' as an example of 'anchoring', where an event or a place becomes neurologically linked or associated with a particular emotional state - in this case, a determination to not be persuaded.

So, how do we 'collapse that anchor', or at least allow it to wear off? One way might be to remind people of when they were in a more open state, when they had just made or were about to make - when they first joined the company, the last time they were looking for a new car, when they moved to a new town or a new country.

People use examples, stories and metaphors all the time to get their point across, so why not design some of your stories to take your audience back to a time when they were ready to make a change? And if the story has a happy ending, so much the better.

4. You could also use a quick rhetorical question, brain-teaser or physical activity to change the audience's state. One example would be getting people to try crossing their arms the opposite way to how they normally do it (full description of this exercise, along with 127 others, in The Trainer's Pack of NLP Exercises).

You may have some other ways of helping your audience to get into a more open mindset. Why not share them by adding a comment below? Go on, blow your own trumpet!