"Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place where you came from with new eyes and extra colours. And the peopole there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving." - from A Hat Full of Sky (US version here)
The respected Australian NLP trainer James Tsakalos recommends that his students read the novels which feature witches in Pratchett's 'Discworld' sequence - and I'm beginning to see why.
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;)
The Map Is Not The Territory
Our conscious awareness has a limited number of 'chunks of attention' (around 7, according to the psychologist George Miller: tinyurl.com/magical7).
So in order to make sense of the huge amount of information that our senses take in each moment from the world around us, we unconsciously filter it.
We have to do this filtering. If we didn't, our brains would be overloaded and the world would appear as a booming, buzzing riot of smells, feelings and colours, just as it must appear to a new-born baby.
These are some of the filtering processes that our brain uses to protect us:
Usually, these 'cognitive shortcuts' work in our favour. Thinking is time-consuming, and expensive in energy terms. If we had to think every single thing we did through from first principles, we would be unable to act at all.
But sometimes, these shortcuts work against us - we miss relevant information, jump to conclusions, or view people through a lens of prejudice.
Some implications
What you experience is not reality. By the time you become aware of experiencing something, it's already been filtered. So your 'reality', as you are experiencing it right now, is subject to the deletions, distortions and generalisations of your filters.
A good map is one that is useful. Since all maps leave out information, the real issue is not "Is this map true?" but "Is this map useful?" A map is useful to the extent that it helps you find your way to where you want to get to.
Yours is not the only truth. Each person has a different viewpoint. They will notice things that you have missed, and vice versa. Their view of 'reality' is as valid to them as yours is to you. People who believe that everyone sees the world in the same way that they do are setting themselves up for constant bewilderment; people who believe that others should see the world as they do are setting themselves up for constant disappointment.
People's actions make sense from their map, which we can never fully know or understand. Often their actions would seem crazy or wrong when judged in the context of our map - so when coaching or communicating with them, suspend judgement.
Some ways to make this principle work for you
1. See other people's point of view
When you have a disagreement with someone, or you just don't understand why they have done something, put yourself in their shoes and look at the world, and yourself, from their point of view. Aim to adopt their map rather than just thinking 'What would I do in that situation?' You will get better-quality information if you match their 'physiology' - stand as they stand, breathe as they breathe and so on.
To avoid the cognitive error of 'mind-reading', remember that the intuitions you get from this exercise are just a guess about what the other person is thinking and feeling. Always check out your intuitions against what the person actually does.
2. To influence someone, start from their map of the world
Don't expect them to jump to your map. Why would anyone want to do that? Instead, start from a position which makes sense to them and is compatible with their values and beliefs, and build bridges to where you want the person to get to.
3. Explore the boundaries of your map
Where are the limits of your map? What do you feel you can't do, or that you don't deserve? The areas in your life that are not going as well as you would like may indicate that your map could do with some tweaks. So:
a) where you have a belief that is not serving you, actively look for examples where that belief is not true
b) where you tend to make generalisations, actively look for counter-examples
c) when you think you can't do something that you would like to do, ask yourself "What would happen if I did?"
Let me know how you get on by adding a comment to this blog, or email me at andy@practicaleq.com
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Inspired by an article in the Jewish Chronicle by Simon Baron-Cohen and Avi Machlis, I've been thinking about the need for empathy, and ways to enhance it. Baron-Cohen and Machlis define empathy as "the ability to imagine someone else’s thoughts and feelings", and decries the apparent lack of this ability on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
They go on to describe some small examples of how empathy can begin to open up some space for resolution of the conflict, such as the The Parents Circle, a grassroots organisation of bereaved Palestinians and Israelis which works for reconciliation, and Anwar Sadat's groundbreaking visit to Israel in 1971, in which he reassured the Israeli parliament that the Jewish state could be recognised.
As professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge and director of its autism research centre, Baron-Cohen knows what he's talking about. Without empathy, we dehumanise the people on the other side of a conflict - as, until very recently, the governments of the USA and Iran were encouraging their people to do. When "the others" are dehumanised, we become indifferent to their suffering and find it easier to justify hurting, deceiving or killing them. We interpret everything they do through the filter of our dehumanising beliefs, and every action of ours that comes from this perspective is likely to make the other side feel justified in their dehumanised view of us.
So if we find ourselves dehumanising an individual or group of people, how can we restore our sense of empathy so that we can start the process of reconcilation? Here is an exercise derived from NLP that uses 'dissociation' (to reduce angry or upset feelings to the point where we can think straight) and 'perceptual positions' to help us imagine their perspective.
The exercise takes account of the idea that everyone has their own view of the world, and that truth is not a monopoly of one individual, belief system or people - especially when it comes to value judgements.
Before you start I want to make sure you understand this: it's your responsibility to choose the intensity of the issue that you want to deal with. You might want to try out the process on something small before you go tackling the most upsetting conflicts in your life. And remember, you can stop whenever you want.
1. Think of a person or group that you feel angry or upset with. Imagine them facing you, at a comfortable distance. Notice the issue between you. What image, sounds or feelings do you get when you think of the issue?
2. Move around until you are beside them - at a comfortable distance, but facing the same way, so that you are both looking at the issue. This shift in itself may bring about a change in how you feel about the issue or about the 'other'.
3. In your mind, float up above the issue, so that you are looking down at you, the issue, and the 'other'. The higher up you float, the less intensity of emotion you will feel. Float up until you reach a comfortable height.
4. Cautiously, float down towards the 'other' - only as quickly as you can still feel calm and resourceful. Remind yourself, "Just like me, this person has their own perspective on the world. Just like me, they are dealing with the world as best they can."
5. When you are ready, float down into the body of the other person. See the issue through their eyes, as they see it. Experience how they feel about the issue, and what they believe about it. What must be true for them in order to behave the way they have been?
6. Now turn and look back at you, from the perspective of the 'other'. Notice how you appear from this perspective. How does the other person see you? What do they believe about you?
7. When you have learned what you need to learn, float out of the 'other' and back into yourself, bringing all that you have learned back with you. Take as long as you need to integrate this new perspective.
8. How is the issue different? What do you feel and believe about the 'other' now?
A couple of caveats and observations:
Nevertheless, you will gain a lot better understanding of the situation, and have more chance of resolving it, if you do this exercise than if you don't.
]]>To save on processing effort and stave off information overload, our brains rely on simple rules or 'heuristics' to make decisions. Two of the heuristics that Cialdini identified in his book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Vladas Griskevicius from the University of Minnesota and a team including Cialdini showed their test subjects movies or gave them books to read that evoked feelings either of fear or romance, and then showed them ads with either a 'social proof' message or a 'scarcity' message.
They found that people in a state of fear are more receptive to social proof messages, while romance makes you more receptive to scarcity messages.
As they point out, this has implications for marketing - the ad or story that precedes your ad may impact its effectiveness; management - tailor the way you deliver your messages to the emotional state of your team; and sales - you might want to spend a few moments to evoke the emotional state most suited to your message.
Articles on Cialdini's site don't usually stick around for longer than a few months, so eventually this link will lead to another article about persuasion and influence. However, here is a link to the team's original academic article about the research which will appear in The Journal of Marketing Research in June 2009: Fear and Loving In Las Vegas: Evolution, Emotion, and Persuasion
Do you want to learn more secrets of influence and effective presentation? If you are already an NLP Practitioner, take our four-day Advanced Influencing Skills course this September. It's part of our NLP Master Practitioner training in Manchester, or you can take it as a stand-alone module.
It's the last one ever (because I'm moving out of running open NLP courses and into more corporate work), and there are only 16 places on the course, some of which have gone already. (See how I've used the Scarcity principle there? It really is your last chance to do this course though.)
Contact me on 0845 83 855 83 or andy@practicaleq.com if you want to know more.
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(sometimes attributed to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)
Thanks to @AboodiShabi for alerting me to this.
]]>Consequently I didn't seek out that kind of work, and didn't get much of it, though I would take it when offered. Of course I had various state management techniques available to me to cover up the appearance of nerves, but it still took effort to apply them.
Nowadays, I'm quite happy working in corporates at any level. So what's changed?
Just one thing - I've done a lot more of this kind of work, and so have built up a collection of positive reference experiences where things went well. The more work I did, the more confident I felt.
This may seem obvious - but there are things you can do to accelerate the process of building up your confidence through experience.
First, a quick bit of theory. In his brilliant book, Transforming Your Self, veteran NLP developer Steve Andreas looked at how we construct our 'self-concept' - our image of ourselves. He found that our internal representation of ourselves as having any particular quality (e.g. being a credible presenter) has a structure. How confident you feel about having that quality comes from how strong and vivid your internal representation is - and there are things you can do to strengthen the structure.
(also, your self-esteem comes from how your self-concept stacks up against your values - if you feel you strongly have a quality that you value, your self-esteem will be high when you think about yourself in relation to that quality. But that's a subject for another posting)
Let's try this out. Think of a quality that you know you have a lot of, and that you approve of - Andreas suggests using 'kindness' as an example. Ask yourself the question: "Are you kind?"
You know the answer to that straight away. The chances are that some image (or sound, or feeling) symbolising your kindness immediately came into your mind. This is your brain's shorthand or summary representation for that quality - any time the question of kindness comes up, you can access the image quickly and easily so you don't have to take any time to think about it.
Now if you ask yourself: "How do you know you are kind?" and give yourself a moment to answer... what comes into your mind in response? I'm guessing that you will be recalling actual memories of times when you showed kindness. These are like a 'database' of reference experiences supporting your initial answer. Other things being equal, the more memories you have of being kind, the more strongly you will feel that you have that quality.
So far, so obvious - the more experience you have of doing something, the more confident you feel about it, right? Except that sometimes it's not as easy as that. Have you ever known someone who had a good quality that everyone else recognised, but they didn't? Or someone who was good at something, but always downplayed their own skill, and seemed to be their own harshest critic? What's going on there?
A couple of things. Firstly, if our reference experiences are not vivid and compelling, they won't have much effect on how we feel. In NLP terms, the 'submodalities' (qualities) of the memories need to be 'turned up' in order for our brains to accord them importance - so memories we experience as small, grey, still pictures will have less impact than those we relive as big, bright, colourful movies. Someone could have lots of experiences that could support their confidence, but they won't register much if they are not remembered vividly.
Secondly, if we don't recognise the experiences as being examples of that quality, they won't get stored in the right 'database' to start with. Someone could have a lot of potential examples of being 'assertive' (a quality that they would approve of) but if their mind is filing the experiences as examples of being 'selfish' (a quality they would disapprove of), they wil feel worse rather than better about these experiences.
Looking back now to my previous life as an IT consultant, I had a lot of experiences that could have taught me a lot about effectiveness in the corporate world, but because my attention was focused elsewhere, I didn't learn that much from them.
Finally, we can also learn from counter-examples - times where we didn't show that particular quality. One of findings that surprised Steve Andreas when he researched self-concept was that a 'robust' self-image (one that is open to feedback, accurately reflects the person's competence level, and doesn't collapse when it is challenged) will include a few counter-examples as well as lots of examples. These counter examples help you to know what not to do, and to recognise and correct any times when you are not showing your desired quality.
I accumulated quite a lot of these experiences in my former career! Following the processes that Steve Andreas outlines, I can go back through them and take the learnings from them, and at the same time tone down any embarrassment or emotional discomfort associated with them.
Practical Exercises
So what if you're not familiar with NLP, 'submodalities' and the like? You can get nearly as good a result by writing and reflection. Try this:
Reference experience mining
For any quality or skill that you want to develop, go back through your life and find examples of when you showed this quality or skill. Write a paragraph or more about each memory. What happened? What was important about it? What did you learn from it? The more vividly you write about it, the more strongly it will be represented in your memory.
Extra tips for this exercise: if, after giving yourself a while to remember, you don't find any examples where you showed the quality yourself, write about episodes you have witnessed where other people showed the quality.
Also, when you have few positive examples written down, you can also use counter examples to strengthen the quality. What did you learn from each of those experiences? What will you definitely do differently next time if a similar situation arises?
Build up new reference experiences
To develop your confidence more, what could you do that will be a stretch in that area, but not too much of a stretch? For example, many people become more confident public speakers by joining their local branch of Toastmasters and developing their skills with a supportive audience. This is a less risky route than starting off by addressing a large, skeptical audience straight away.
Get the book
This quote is often attributed to W. Edwards Deming but the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog sources it to a book by George Box.
]]>"When a person is in a space with a 10-foot ceiling, they will tend to think more freely, more abstractly," said Meyers-Levy. "They might process more abstract connections between objects in a room, whereas a person in a room with an 8-foot ceiling will be more likely to focus on specifics."
This information is take from the University of Minnesota's press release.
The findings suggest to me that the human brain works metaphorically - although this article by Chris Morris offers an alternative explanation, that people just have more room to make big pictures in their minds when there is a high ceiling.
]]>Sometimes tiny changes in the way the environment is set up can have big results. For example, I know from being a trainer that if you want people to talk to each other and feel part of a group, you arrange the chairs in the training room in a circle. If you want them to shut up and listen to you giving them information, arrange the chairs theatre-style in flat lines.
In my small-group NLP courses, I arrange the chairs in a single shallow horseshoe shape which gives a nice blend of participation and focus on the trainer. In Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training, I arrange the chairs 'cabaret style' with round tables, to encourage participation in workgroups.
What changes could you make in your working or home environment to make yourself or your team more productive?
]]>I once had some business dealings with the head of a video production company, a big guy who my colleagues (and I) found somewhat intimidating. After meeting him a couple of times, I realised that the secret of his unsettling demeanour was that he didn't "do" rapport. Whether unconsciously or as a deliberate tactic, he failed to respond with the usual repertoire of nods, smiles and looks that normally send the non-verbal message "yes I hear you".
As a good NLP'er I did my best to match him; when he made some off-colour joke (and his poor female employees had to simper along with it) I remained resolutely stone-faced. It seemed to work; as far as I could tell from the content of what he said and the rest of his behaviour, he respected me.
The whole episode brought home to me how much we normally rely on non-verbal responses; if you say something intended to be amusing and it doesn't elicit at least a polite smile, it can be almost as disconcerting as when we put out our hand on meeting someone and they refuse to shake it.
Behavioural Reinforcement And Rapport
Anchoring, one of the central components of NLP, was inspired by Pavlov's work on classical conditioning.
Essentially, anchoring links a particular state to a specific stimulus,
so that we can evoke or change states at will. Interestingly, academic
psychology's equally well-documented study of operant conditioning to shape behaviour
seems to have had little influence on NLP so far. This is all the more
surprising since behaviourism was a dominant model in psychology in the
fifties and sixties – though perhaps the behaviourists' insistence
on treating subjective experience as an irrelevance, or in hardline
cases denying its existence altogether, didn't fit well with NLP as
"the study of subjective experience". This article suggests that the
behaviourist concept of "positive reinforcement" can clarify our
understanding of rapport and how to achieve it.
So what is positive reinforcement? "A reinforcer is anything that, occurring in conjunction with an act, tends to increase the probability that the act will occur again."8 Reinforcers in conversation between two people might be the laugh you get when you tell a joke, a nod when you say something you believe in, or even something as little as a grunted acknowledgement when you say hello.
The key element is that it the reinforcer is an immediate response to an action, providing instant feedback. This allows the reinforcer to work at the unconscious level (as the unconscious needs that proximity in time to make a link between the behaviour and the reinforcing response). I want to emphasise that reinforcers are not the same as rewards, which may be given long after the behaviour has happened – and consequently can require the participation of the conscious mind to make the link.
Positive reinforcers can provide the unconscious mind with the information "Yes – you're on the right track. Keep on doing more of this." Subjectively this will be experienced as a feeling of comfort and ease – rather like the feeling which NLP manuals and textbooks traditionally describe as being one of the ways of knowing when you are in rapport.
"Flow" States And Feedback
In Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness9, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes "optimal experience" as something rather similar; a state in which we lose our self-consciousness because all our attention is on what we are doing. We have probably all experienced this when taking part in a stimulating conversation. Interestingly, Csikszentmihalyi's research reveals that people of all ages report positive moods most often when they are with friends.
One of that characteristics that Csikszentmihalyi defines as necessary for an activity to make entering a flow state possible is the presence of immediate feedback – such as the immediate, subtle non-verbal responses we get when we are in rapport with another person.
"That's Right"
One of the standard early exercises for teaching Ericksonian hypnosis skills on many NLP trainings is the "That's Right" exercise10. Apparently one way that Milton Erickson used to induce trance was to utter the reassuring phrase "That's right" whenever the client showed some sign of trance. When this is done in the training room, "practitioners" are usually surprised at how rapidly the subject slips into a trance state – and the subject usually reports how pleasant the experience felt.
Clearly what Erickson is doing here – and what we are doing when we follow his example in the exercise - is reinforcing desired behaviour by encouraging it whenever it occurs. The result is that the behaviour being reinforced – showing signs of trance – happens more frequently, until very soon the subject enters trance completely.
It's worth noticing that when a phrase such as "that's right" is used without reference to any immediately preceding behaviour – as is sometimes done, for example, by inexperienced NLP trainers – it tends to lose rapport with an audience and may come across as patronising.
Matching and Mirroring vs. Reinforcement: An Example
Let's say I'm working in an open plan office with a colleague, and I casually ask her a question. No reply. After a moment or two I look across at her – her body posture matches mine, she happens to be matching my rate of breathing, and even (were I to consciously notice it) my blink rate (let's assume I know my colleague well enough to discount the possibility that she is mimicking my body language for purposes of mockery – in fact the thought doesn't even cross my mind).
A moment or two more passes. I'm becoming quite uncomfortable. Has she heard me? Is she deliberately ignoring me? Have we reached a point yet where it wouldn't be rude to repeat the question – and if so, should I repeat it louder?
My point is that in this situation all the matching and mirroring that she is doing is not creating a feeling of rapport – which according to the letter of the NLP textbooks, it should. In fact, I would welcome any sort of shift in posture, even if it takes her completely away from mirroring me; at least it would be some sort of response that I could take as a sign that she has heard me and that my communication has had some effect. Any kind of response would do.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly matching and mirroring do contribute to achieving rapport more rapidly and deeply. I believe that the responding to actions that Goleman describes between mother and baby (see Part I) – and which we can also observe or experience in any successful communication between adults – is a "missing piece" that the received wisdom of NLP has somehow overlooked. Matching in time, by responding to behaviour (and hence reinforcing it) is as important as matching posture in space. We need to "carry back" to our partners that their message has been heard and understood.
So when my exercise partner at the NLP conference mirrored my gestures when I was speaking, the reason it felt strange was that the timing was out – the gestures were not a response to what I was saying. When the boss of the video company made people feel uncomfortable, he did so by not responding – by suppressing the almost unconscious non-verbal responses that we would normally expect in conversation.
How could we have missed something so obvious? After all, even though responsiveness and reinforcement is not formally taught in the rapport segment of an NLP training, we still generate rapport rapidly during the exercises – and we don't generally come a cropper when using the matching and mirroring skills we have learned later on in "real life".
My guess is that the appropriate non-verbal responses that reinforce rapport, signal someone to continue speaking, and let the speaker know that they have been heard, are something that we do anyway. Our conscious intent to achieve rapport as good NLP'ers, in an exercise or a real-life situation such as meeting someone for the first time, may well amplify our non-verbal responses and reinforcers without us noticing. Because these responses are a part of being human, we are normally no more aware of them than the fish is aware of the water.
At the beginning of Frogs Into Princes, Bandler and Grinder state that "The basic unit of analysis in face-to-face conversation is the feedback loop."11 As with so much else in their early work, we would benefit from exploring further the direction that the NLP pioneers so tantalisingly hinted at.
Footnotes:
8. Karen Pryor, Don’t Shoot the Dog! The New Art of Teaching And Training (Revised Edition), Ringpress Books (2002): an excellent introduction to the use of reinforcement in shaping behaviour, and the book that sparked off the idea for this article.
9. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Classic Work On How To Achieve Happniess,
Rider & Co (2002)
10. John Overdurf and Julie Silverthorn, Training Trances: Multi-Level Communication in Therapy and Training, Metamorphous Press (1995)
11. Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Frogs Into Princes, Eden Grove Editions (1990).
If you would like to train in NLP
with a trainer who won't just regurgitate what his trainer told him,
and who has read and thought deeply around the subject, call Andy Smith
now on
0845 83 855 83 or e-mail him at andy@practicaleq.com.