He began employing a pattern interrupt (see the NLPjargonalert icon that follows this list). Each time his colleagues began talking about the problems they were experiencing. He discovered how to differentiate between when the talk was negative, simply because his colleagues felt good about feeling bad, and when a need arose to solve a genuine problem. When the talk was meaningless negativity, David held his hand up and said something along the lines of ‘Let’s stop wallowing; we know things are tough and they’re likely to get tougher but we’ve got to stay strong.’ After a while, just having David hold his hand up switched his colleagues into problem-solving mode.
David found out that dread, for him, had two components. He felt the fear as heaviness descending, sliding down from his shoulders, and saw a solid, black cube encasing his torso. The cube was a metaphor for the way he felt in his body (see Chapter 17 for more on metaphors).
Each time the dread returned, David changed the picture of the cube by introducing pockets of silver into it. The cube turned into a honeycomb of grey and then silver until it disappeared. (Check out Chapter 10 for more on submodalities.) While he worked with the image, David also did some breath work with an affirmation that he said out loud, if he was by himself. He drew a breath deep into the centre of the cube and on each exhalation he said, ‘I’m relaxed, strong, and confident, and I feel good.’
A pattern interrupt is when a break occurs in a pattern of thought or behaviour.
For example, when a coach asks a client, ‘How can I help?’, the client may take a deep breath, link into feeling bad about a problem, and burst into tears.
These steps constitute part of the sequence in the programming that the client has with regards to the problem. The coach may break the flow in the pattern by doing or saying something unexpected. Anecdotally, Richard Bandler has been said to have tipped water over a client to break her pattern.
The aim of the unexpected interruption is to break the neurological links that a person has built into a sequence.
The sword of Damocles of job cuts is still hanging over David, but he no longer allows himself to become incapacitated. He realises that he has a life away from work and that he’d rather have a ‘whole life’ than put his life on hold until he can get away from work at the end of the day.
One rather interesting side-effect occurred as a result of David’s acceptance of the change. His manager noticed that he was far more productive than other members of staff and decided to offer him a promotion when the cuts were done. Now David feels that he’s more secure if/when future cuts are announced and is more engaged with his work. His productivity is better now that he doesn’t feel the dread that was his constant companion before he decided to change the way he thought. He gets more recognition for his work, and so he’s more engaged and finds himself in an upward spiral.
Being willing to experiment
When a section of an IT department was being outsourced, some of the people who were going to lose their jobs buried their heads in the sand and waited for the inevitable. A couple of people, however, were willing to experiment with new ways of working and developed their hobbies into potential businesses. The difference in mindset gave this pair the flexibility to move forward. The other group was stuck in inactivity and helplessness because they were unable to think beyond ‘I’ve always worked in IT’ and hope they’d find work in a diminishing market.
Part of this healthy mindset is accepting that nothing’s permanent and that the person with the most flexibility in a system survives and may even thrive.
Being fearful stops you experimenting and creating options for yourself.
Getting Help on the Way
You may find that managing simple change on your own is easy. For introducing bigger changes, however, getting help facilitates the process.
For personal change, you can get relevant help, such as that of a coach, a nutritionist, a financial advisor, an estate agent, or if you think of a holiday as a temporary change, you may employ the services of a travel counsellor.
For making change at work, using change champions is essential. A department of 500 people was being restructured. The staff were broken up into groups of 20. Each group was assigned a staff manager and all information was funnelled through that manager. The 20 managers bought into the change and went out and sold the change to their teams. They were in effect the ‘change champions’.
This reorganisation turned out to be one of the more successful, with minimum disruption and loss of productivity. Another reason given for the success of the project was that the management team and the top 200 people out of 500 all had individual one-on-one coaching sessions. Management placed a high value on clear communication and timely support systems for employees.
Strengthening resources
Throughout this book, we talk about the need to be flexible. Being willing to experiment is an aspect of being flexible and you’re more likely to experiment if you’re in a resourceful state. When you feel resourceful, you can find ways around problems more easily. This mindset, in turn, makes change a lot easier for you to deal with than if you were to feel resentful.
Alan, a salesman, was unstoppable when he felt well and energetic. Other days he just couldn’t cut the mustard. He decided to make a memory of himself on one of his unstoppable days. To do this, he picked a day on which he’d been really successful and wrote down, in graphic detail, exactly what he’d seen, heard, and done to make himself feel so energetic and unstoppable. He used his notes to create an anchor of being unstoppable (Chapter 9 has all the info on how to use anchors). Initially, Alan did the exercise with a friend who helped him follow each step of the exercise correctly. When he could remember the steps, he was able to do the exercise by himself. His sales went up by 15 per cent in the first three months after he started employing his
‘unstoppable anchor’ before seeing a sales prospect.
Future pacing
Even when you’ve chosen to introduce some change into your life, you may at times find that your resolve wavers. A useful exercise for staying on track is to mentally take yourself into the future to the time when you’ve achieved your goal to remind yourself of what you want to achieve. This technique is particularly good when you start a programme of healthy eating and are being tempted by a chocolate bar whispering your name. You can use this process to break the unhelpful strategy (turn to Chapter 12 to discover more on breaking habits) of instant gratification by building an extra step into developing a strategy for developing awareness of what you eat; in fact, being mindful of all your actions.
Planning the road map
As Billy Wilder is reputed to have said, ‘Hindsight is always twenty–twenty.’
One way of achieving your goals is to know where you’re at, where you want to go, and then logically work out the steps you have to take to get to your goal. An even better way to do this is to pretend ‘as if’ you’ve achieved your goal and work backwards, with hindsight, following the steps in this exercise (see Chapter 14 for more about ‘as-if reframing’). Chapter 13 tells you in detail how to ‘time travel’.
This exercise is a variation on the ‘Getting rid of anxiety’ exercise in Chapter 13 and can show you a different way of using time lines: