Taking One Step Forward
The decision to make a change takes just a moment, but the change itself can take anywhere from a few minutes to a lifetime. What’s important to recognise is that in order to incorporate change you have to do something actively. This section looks at the importance of the first and last steps in a change project.
Making that initial move
The first step is the most important because it starts the momentum that takes you to the second and subsequent steps of your journey. Often, breaking down a goal into smaller, manageable chunks keeps you motivated on the path to success.
Susan, a drug addict for 24 years, was walking home from a nightclub very early one morning, when an encounter with an acquaintance turned her life around. When she tried to talk to him, all he said to her was, ‘Go home, look in the mirror, and make some different choices.’ Susan went home and looked in the mirror and saw that she looked terrible. Her skin was grey, she had dark shadows under her eyes, she was bedraggled and emaciated, and she acknowledged that she looked and felt dreadful.
She decided then and there, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore. I don’t want to look like this anymore.’ This decision, although all stated in the negative (check out Chapter 4 on how to create well-formed outcomes) was the first step Susan took in taking back control of her life. She had a strong ‘away- from’ motivation pattern, recognising what she didn’t want. (See Chapter 8 for more on the ‘away-from’ motivation pattern.)
The next thing she did was to change her environment. She stopped seeing her drug-taking friends and got a job. During her clean-up phase, a neighbour suggested that Susan attend teacher-training college. This suggestion started Susan on her path to learning to become an excellent coach and get her MA degree in humanistic psychology.
Celebrating and closure
Many goal-setting processes go into great depth, talking about well-formed outcomes, planning the road map, and taking the first step. Not many talk about the last step or closure. Admittedly, closure isn’t the last step in the grand scheme of things, but integrating a last step to signal the end of a phase in a project or the project itself can be very useful.
Any change requires focus and the expenditure of huge amounts of physical and emotional energy and puts people under considerable stress. This stress can be distress (bad stress) or eustress (good stress, what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the author of several inspirational books, calls flow). In either case you need a period to recharge your batteries. Getting closure releases the tension of concentrated work, signals the end of a phase, and gives you permission to move on to the next challenge.
End a project – which could be work at home (such as having your garden landscaped) or at work (where you’re involved with improving productivity within a team) – with a debrief. You could examine the following:
✓ What went well?
✓ What could have been better?
✓ What lessons were learned?
✓ What will you do differently next time?
Remember to congratulate the team (even if that team has only one member – you) and finally make sure that you celebrate!
The Part of Tens
You see why the famous For Dummies Part of Tens is so well loved as we put more information quickly and simply at your fingertips. This part gives you a taste of the broad impact of NLP on everyday life, from parents and teachers to sales success and personal development. We provide something for everyone: ten applications of NLP, other books to read, online resources to use, and films to watch. And you see just how much more you can find out now that you’ve become curious.
Ten Applications of NLP
In This Chapter
▶ Taking your new-found skills into the world
▶ Making NLP work for you in all areas of your life
We find daily applications for NLP in our work as professional coaches, consultants, and trainers. Also, at home with family and friends, NLP influences how we think and behave. So, how can you use NLP in your life?
In this chapter, we present ten practical suggestions that we hope get you curious about how you can apply the contents of this book right now.
Remember that these points are only suggestions: you choose what makes a difference for you and the people you connect with.
Developing Yourself
Personal development is a massive arena, because people are searching for meaning and contentment in an unpredictable world. When you read this book, we hope that you take away this one lesson: NLP offers a means for you to learn, grow, and develop yourself, and you can choose whether the ideas fit for you, or not. In addition, you can use NLP to coach and help others too, in which case you need to stay strong and healthy yourself so that you can be an authentic role model.
The NLP toolkit offers a collection of models and exercises, as well as encouraging an inquisitive mindset, which allows you to do the following:
✓ Choose your most resourceful emotional state and use anchors, a mental technique to access and hold that good state when you’re feeling challenged. You progress best when you feel safe enough to have a go at something new. To explore how to set and fire anchors, look at Chapter 9.
✓ Guide your thinking in different ways using the assumptions on which NLP is based: check out Chapter 2 for more on these NLP presuppositions.
✓ Find out what makes you function at your best – gathering information about how you reflect your experience through your senses, what NLP calls representational systems. You can get to grips with representational systems (sometimes called modalities) in Chapter 6.
✓ Take responsibility for your own learning instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you.
✓ Increase clarity on what you really want in all aspects of your life. The well-formed outcomes we introduce in Chapter 4 are fundamental to looking at what you want. Also check out the checklist in Appendix C.
✓ Find out how to make changes at the most appropriate logical level of experience to improve your ability and self-confidence – whether that confidence is about your environment, behaviour, capability, beliefs, identity, or purpose. This aspect is discussed further in Chapter 11.
✓ Pay attention to what is happening for you in terms of your energy levels, to ensure that you don’t push yourself too hard and burn-out.
✓ Discover how to build rapport more easily: we devote the whole of Chapter 7 to developing this important skill.
Managing Your Personal and Professional Relationships
‘Help. This relationship isn’t working!’ Having a bad relationship with
someone can be a horrible, stuck experience. The door is closed in your face.
One statement you hear a lot in NLP is ‘If what you’re doing isn’t working, do something different.’ Fortunately, NLP offers many ways for you to get unstuck and open the door to more possibilities. Here are a couple of methods you can start with:
✓ The Meta Model: This model provides a way for you to delve below the surface of vague everyday language like ‘I’m not happy with this,’ with useful questions that gather specific information and challenge assumptions that get in the way of happy and rewarding relationships.
When you know how to communicate more precisely, you can get to the heart of what you and other people really mean to say. The Meta Model is described in detail in Chapter 15.
✓ The NLP meta-mirror: This technique encourages you take different perceptual positions. The meta-mirror is a favourite method for exploring challenging situations through the act of examining how you relate to other people. By taking different viewpoints into account, you come away with fresh ideas to move your relationships forward – or say a polite goodbye. The meta-mirror is described in detail in Chapter 7.
Negotiating a Win–Win Solution
Suppose that you’re going to enter into an important negotiation in your life:
perhaps you’ve spotted the home of your dreams. NLP can help you to get the best deal when you’re confronted with estate agents pushing you to buy the new house at the highest price while selling your current one as low as possible. NLP helps accomplish your aim by providing principles and
strategies you can use to everybody’s advantage. Take a look at the techniques in the following list, which although we relate to buying a house you can apply whether you’re negotiating for a job, buying a car, hiring contract staff at work, or involved in any conflict resolution:
✓ Go for the positive outcome – begin with your desired result in mind.
Use positive language. Always focus on what you want rather than what you don’t want. For the full story on outcomes, see Chapter 4.
✓ Engage your senses – make your outcome more specific by noticing what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like when you achieve a
successful negotiation. You can get a sense of this technique in Chapter 6.
✓ Note down your hot buttons (your preferred criteria) – focus on five key elements that are important to you in making the move. Put them in order of priority and keep returning to them to check that you’re getting what you want.
✓ Note down the hot buttons from the point of view of the sellers – what’s important to them? Imagine what being in their shoes would be like and remind yourself of what they want every time you have contact.
✓ Keep in mind what positive by-products you get from the house you already have that you don’t want to lose. These positive elements may be the number of bathrooms, the sunny south-facing garden, or the good local transport.
✓ Know your bottom line. Be prepared to walk away with no deal instead of getting carried away in the moment just to complete a deal that’s disappointing for you.
✓ Manage your state of mind. Staying calm and relaxed when the negotiation gets to you helps you to make the best next move. Take a look at Chapter 9 about dropping anchors.
✓ Use the technique of chunking – the ability to be able to shift someone’s view to the big picture or focus down to specifics confidently. Chunking is a key skill in any negotiation. If you’re disagreeing on details, chunk upwards from the specifics of your contract to gain common agreement on key points, and then you can chunk downwards to smaller issues when you’ve achieved that common ground. Chapter 15 helps you to get specific when necessary, while Chapter 16 shows you how to speak in general terms that are easy to agree with. With this flexibility in your approach, you increase the chances of the other person hearing your message loud and clear.
✓ Maintain rapport with everyone in the sale chain. Even when you disagree with the content of what they’re saying, match and mirror their body language and tone of voice. Things progress more smoothly when everybody listens! We cover the all-important NLP skill of rapport building in Chapter 7. Also, Chapter 6 gives you more ways of building rapport by recognising whether someone has a visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic preference, and then using language to match that person’s preference.
Meeting Those Sales Targets
You may have met two types of salespeople. Some just want to sell to you regardless of whether you want to buy: their goal is to hit their targets and you may be just an enemy – the budget holder – to conquer along the way.
They want to get their commission and then get the hell out of there in their new car, lights flashing, horn tooting at anyone in their way. Fortunately, some salespeople take the longer view, and approach their profession by building good relationships with clients. They’re probably very well-focused on targets and yet they take their time, and they listen carefully to what the other person wants before they attempt to share knowledge. Selling the product comes further down the line.
NLP principles apply to creating strong sales relationships. They allow you to build rapport, get clarity on what other people want, understand their values and criteria, and be flexible along the way until you close a deal or decide to walk away because you know the fit isn’t right. NLP reminds you to listen not only to the words being spoken, but also pay attention to the physiology.
Where do the eyes move, or how does the colour of someone’s skin change according to their feelings.
Taking the NLP approach leads to a winning situation that’s highly considerate and respectful. Integrity is the key word that comes to mind here. Good salespeople are able to take the customer’s perspective and match the benefit of the product to the customer’s need. People don’t want to be blatantly sold to: they want to be listened to and find solutions to their issues. They want products and services that help them run a business or enjoy life more; they want the ‘feel-good’ factor. NLP deals with influence and how people make decisions, and successful sales are ones that match the customer needs at many levels.
Here’s a saying to bear in mind: ‘People buy on emotion and justify with fact.’ Whether you’re selling a product or an idea, you connect primarily with people on an emotional level. People buy you first, before they buy what you’re selling.
Creating Powerful Presentations
The ability to communicate well is fundamental to your success. In fact, you may find that it’s the single most important skill that affects your future.
When you can present well you have the leading edge in so many areas of life, whether your passion is to be a politician, sportsperson, teacher, TV
presenter, cheerleader, or business leader of the year. Have you got the self-confidence to go out and stand up for what you believe in? Do you really want to sit through a celebration dinner scared because you have to give the vote of thanks at the end? If you can present well, you can get ahead. Or simply relax and have a good time.
So what’s stopping you making powerful presentations? In one word – you!
Sadly, so many people we meet are terrified of presenting. And if they’re not terrified, they certainly prefer to hang around backstage than get out front and sock it to an audience.
NLP can make a difference for you in three ways:
✓ It shows you how to make your purpose in presenting crystal clear.
✓ It shows you how to touch everyone in an audience through your use of language.
✓ It shows you how to feel confident about standing up in front of any group.
Imagine that you’ve been invited to do a talk at the annual meeting of your local gardening club. (For gardening, substitute your own hobby from hamster-training to glider-flying.)
Using NLP, your first task is to engage your brain to decide on the outcome of your presentation. What result, or action, do you want to happen, when people have been so inspired by your speech? Map out this outcome clearly for yourself, bearing in mind what the audience would like to discover from you.
As you begin to build the content of your talk, think VAK – visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic (head to Chapter 6 for tips on engaging with people’s dominant senses). How are you going to connect with people who like pictures, those who hear the words, and those who just go with their gut feelings? As you develop your script, remember that some people just need the headlines and others like the nitty-gritty details.
Remember that NLP gives you the tools to prepare mentally for any
presentation. Get clear about how you want to appear at the presentation – laughing and jovial, full of deep and meaningful gravitas, or perhaps somewhere in between? Find a time when you were like that in the past, so that you can hold, or anchor, the previous experience and regain that feeling for yourself. Turn to Chapter 9 for all about setting stage anchors.
Here’s the most important tip – the Holy Grail: don’t get hung up on other people’s tips and techniques. We all present differently, and being yourself can be refreshing. When you speak from the heart about something you care passionately about, people connect with your authenticity and sense of purpose.
Managing Your Time and Precious Resources
Everybody has the same amount of time in the week: 168 hours. So why do some people spend their lives racing against the clock while others gently amble along? The difference is in how people use that time.
Understanding how you relate to time makes a big difference to your daily experience. NLP distinguishes between people who operate in time – where you live in and for the moment – and people who operate through time – where you step back to view past, present, and future as an onlooker. Being in the moment is easier when you’re in time. Planning time is much easier when you’re through time. Time-travelling tips are waiting for you in Chapter 13.
As an NLP coach, Kate encourages her clients to notice how they relate to time, and to spend it wisely, in order to understand the impact of spending time on what they don’t want to be doing and freeing up their energy for what really motivates them. Your time is precious, and when you’ve spent it, you can’t reclaim it.
Taking on too much to please others has the opposite effect when you let them down. NLP shows you how to say ‘no’ while maintaining rapport with friends and colleagues.
Being Coached to Success
Do you want to do something, something in particular that you’ve thought about for a long time but have yet to start or to achieve? If so, NLP coaching can help you make that leap from the idea – the initial desire to make a change – to making it happen.
When you work with a coach who embraces the principles of NLP with skill, that person uses the NLP presuppositions and believes in your unlimited potential. The coach supports you in achieving goals that seemed impossible, by getting you clear on your values and beliefs and changing the interference that gets in your way. And that can be seriously liberating and fun. No joking.
NLP coaching focuses your attention on getting the results you want – the outcomes – and stops you dithering along the way, dissipating energy on all the things that you don’t want. NLP helps you to jump over or remove the barriers that stop you. Coaching closes that gap from where you are now to where you want to get to – from your present state to your desired state.
Action turns the dream into reality. One key reason why coaching gets you results is that you make a commitment to action. Another reason is that you break down your goals into bite-sized, realistic chunks. When you work with a coach you make a commitment to somebody else, as if somebody’s standing beside you with the stopwatch and clipboard and checking in at regular intervals to make sure that you’re on track.
The principles of NLP can apply to achieving success in sports, and so you often find sports coaches using the anchoring techniques of NLP to help a client get into a confident state before a big match or performance.
Coaching is often about enabling people to restore their balance and harmony. We believe that coaching is about much more than simply
excelling on the golf course or in boardroom battles. Taking a holistic view – considering all aspects of your life – enables you to create your own future.
We coach highly successful executives who want to be outstanding in their work. By examining the whole picture of their lives as well as their work patterns, these people unleash their own energy and direction to get what they want.
If you excel in one aspect of your life to the detriment of other aspects, say your work, life at work may be great but your home life becomes miserable.
You then have an unbalanced and potentially unhealthy existence. Clients who succeed at the extreme heights in business can damage their health or important relationships along the way. And those who have a very comfortable home life can neglect their professional potential. If these scenarios describe you, finding an NLP coach can help you restore balance and harmony to your life.
Using NLP to Support Your Health
‘Stressed’ spelled backwards is ‘desserts’. Little wonder that dieting is so stressful when you keep seeing those puddings in front of your eyes – puddings can be very attractive when you’re stressed!