How NLP Techniques Work - an example

Time to get straight to the point and describe for you how a particluar technique from the tool box works. The co-creators of NLP, Bandler and Grinder, developed a pattern that utilises what are known as 'submodalities'. These are the images, sounds and feelings associated with our experiences.

I'll describe it in laymans terms, non-techny, no jargon. What we are going to do is this. Below are a set of instructions, read through them one by one and take your time developing the images (you'll find out what I mean in a second or so). Be prepared to close your eyes and you may want to do that, as for some it heightens the effectiveness of the process.

TRY THIS SIMPLE PROCESS

Here you go, start now, after you have read the first part of this process:

Part 1 - Take a moment to think about where you live, your house, the place you go home to.

Imagine you are stood looking at your house, facing the front, looking at the front door, noticing some of the finer details that only you know exist or noticing some other feature.

(By doing this you have probably seen a visual image in your memory of your house)


Part 2 - Now. See that house image again, theone you just had and note the following:

Is the image colour or black and white?
Moving or still?
Are you in the image or not?
Panoramic or TV or Postcard in size?
If you were to reach out and touch it where would it be?
Is it 2D or 3D?
Where is it located in your visual field?

You should now have a set of data that describes a small section of the 'code' of that memory of your home. (There are many others involved across all of the senses. The questions contained here are from the 'visual' sense)



Part 3 - Now. Think about your workplace..

..and choose a task or situation where you experience a 'feeling' that is not the best feeling for the task to be completed to the best of its ability.

When you think about you doing that, or your memory of it, take a moment to think about it and you'll begin to recall an image/memory of that time. Let that happen.

Part 4 - Think of the image again and ask the following questions:

Is the image colour or black and white?
Moving or still?
Are you in the image or not?
Panoramic or TV or Postcard in size?
If you were to reach out and touch it where would it be?
Is it 2D or 3D?
Where is it located in your visual field?

By now you have a small part of the code of that experience you imagined.

Why ask the questions? What's going on?

These are some of the questions I ask my clients about their 'experiences of being in challenging situations' and when I say experiences I'm talking about things like public speaking, cold calling, meeting people for the first time, negotiating and many other challenges people face where they 'behave or feel' a way that is not productive to the task at hand.

What I'm doing by asking these questions about the memory is defining the 'code' of the experience. After that you ask a client 'what word describes how you feel' and then to 'point to where the feeling is.' I then go on to change some of the memory coding and that changes the position of the feeling and that in turn changes the word the client uses to describe how they feel. Same memory, slightly different in structure now and a different word to describe it.

Imagine a piano keyboard. From key 'C' up an octave to 'C' there are different keys that when stroked produce a different sound. The same applies here with this technique. The word panic is mostly associated with feelings in a different place to confident. The techniques allow you to play any tune you want to in any given situation.

Straight forward and effective change that gets results. That's what it's all about, changing your experience so you can feel different. You know as well as I do, when you feel different about something, you get a different result.

Marking out in time

Sports personality of the year brings back fond memories of child hood for me. It appears to mark out a certain point in time in the year that Christmas is upon us and all the things that happened earlier in the year are now behind us, or to the side, or somewhere else......

If you were to think about where you are now and were to point in the direction of the future, where would it be?
Go on, point to it.

After you've done that, point to where the past is.

Some people have what's called their 'time line' running through loads of different directions, up and down, left to right, diagonal, infront only, the list goes on.

When you are out communciating with someone next and they are using their hands to communicate, look at how they mark out items and timeframes in 'spaces' or locations. What direction are the movements in, what does that say about where they mark out their timings? For example someone might say, "last week I went to..." whilst pointing back over their shoulder. Alternatively, someone might say, "I was looking at buying this car" and all of a sudden their attention is away from you and they are looking into thin air......seeing the car again in whatever direction they are looking.

Why do we need to know this? When you are communicating back to them, maybe re-communicating certain things they have mentioned, you can refer to those areas by subtly pointing to them to acknowledge their existence. Afterall, from the other persons perspective, that is really where they are!

Communicate to them on their level and you'll get results.

Did Pavlov have the X Factor and not know?

Over the last couple of months, Saturday nights in the UK have been filled with TV programmes that celebrate the performances of people who are moving nearer and nearer to their personal goals. For it doesn't matter whether or not it's singing on stage in front of millions of viewers, dancing with a professional, attending an important business meeting or making a sales call to a new business, the patterns of behaviour that are encoded within us will determine our result in that situation.

Let me explain....
Think about you and your employment/business. Now, think about tasks that if you were to be honest with yourself, you may 'avoid' or find 'challenging' and if you are a small business owner, you may resonate with something along the lines of making a sales call or standing up to give a presentation that has a lot of weight attached to it. Take a moment to imagine you are in that situation and having to do that thing you find challenging.


For some people you may have 'imagined' or created a visual representation of the event in you minds eye. You may have 'gone back' to an event, or time, when you were 'doing that thing' and as you think about the finer details of the situation, you might also begin to feel slightly different as the internal sensation associated with that task starts to grow inside you and suddenly you notice you are feeling a bit 'different' now.

So what happened?
What's happened could be associated with Pavlovian Theory (1890's). Ivan Pavlov was experimenting with the saliva responses of dogs and noted that when presented with food, the dogs would start to produce saliva. Some reports go on to state that he then moved on to use instruments such as tuning forks, bells and others, to associate those sounds with the visual of the food that would condition the production of saliva (response) to the sounds of the instruments (stimulus), even without food.

Similarities can be seen between the imagery you created of the 'challenging task' and the feelings you produced as a result of thinking about that challenging task. Upon production of the image (stimulus), you produced a reaction (response) that you may describe in words as nervousness, procrastination, apprehension or some other description, depending on what you're thinking.

So why might Pavlov hold the key to having the X Factor?

Performance, in any context depends on a number of sequences firing together to produce the right 'frame of mind' to perform to 'potential'. By that, what I mean is that we react to information that comes in through our senses that creates the internal responses that govern our behaviour. That challenging task you were thinking of earlier, could you really do it if you put your mind to it? Do you have the elements that could be put together to complete it? Could you physically do it? Is there anything that realistically is stopping you? Or is what's stopping you related to how you feel about it?

Personal development techniques or psychology tools that take your mind through a different set of processes, slightly different to what you are usually used to, allow a person to create the required feelings that would enable them to take action in areas in which a person procrastinates, avoids, dislikes. Think about any situation in which you'd want to 'feel better doing it' and what you might look forward to achieving if that change could be made!

Desensitise or substitute?

These tools are often used in association with desensitising a person against a particular food, sometimes drugs, yet in a business environment, desensitisation of feelings associated with challenging contexts like sales calls or public speaking, or even coming into contact with a particular person could result in a person creating a much more attractive outcome for themselves. What makes this even more fascinating is understanding that instead of desensitising the feeling, other feelings can be substituted to meet the requirements of the task. Think about it like this. Instead of being anxious before a speech of some description and displaying the common behaviours associated with someone who doesn't enjoy public speaking, then conditioning a state/frame of mind such as 'supreme confidence' to be respond to the stimulus of public speaking can be achieved, eliminating any previous fear of the task and now approaching it with supreme confidence.

Perfection is unrealistic yet excellence is a level which we can strive towards. If your actions (responses) are driven by reactions to situations (stimulus) and the response you associate with situations can be changed, what would happen if you were to look at your situation, what you could change and what you might achieve if you can do that. In addition, if you could take your mind through a process that would allow you to experience preferred responses would you do it?

Thanks to the Pavlov, next time you are watching 'one of those programmes' and assessing the performance of that person, what is it they've got that you think you haven't and then think could you have it?

What would it be like......?

When presenting your solution to your audience either formally or informally, face to face, over the telephone, or any other communication context, to get people to resonate with what it is you are offering requires you to allow them to consider "What would it be like if I had it?"

It makes sense doesn't it? Putting a person in that mental space that allows them to fully associate with what it is that is on offer, mentally experiencing being in a situation with the product/service or noticing what its like, receiving the benefit associated with it - that's what makes a sale.


When you're next in a sales context, make an (un)conscious effort to ask one or more of the following question(s):


What would it be like to have increased productivity?
What would it mean for you to.........
How would having a 'x' impact the business?
What would it be like to see an improvement/saving in 'x'?


Only by doing this can a prospect identify the necessary questions that he/she needs to ask to make the right decision for them. Only after going through the process (that takes a split second) of making the mental images, maybe hearing the sounds that occur as they are in that situation with you offering, and feeling the feelings associated with having the product/service in place. Only then can the right questions be raised.

Associate your prospects with your offering and you're doing them a favour by allowing them to raise the right questions that create a sale.