As you spend more time with the exemplars, you’re likely to need to take one specific aspect of their process and break that into sub-processes, and dwell on the details for a while. You might also begin to notice things not made explicit, such as strategies for mulling over ideas and the part that less obvious activities such as walking and meditation play in working to get clarity of thought. You might also notice the fact that one writer also scribbles lots of long hand-written notes in a café while another records ideas into a tape recorder as part of their drafting process. If you were to model a third writer, you may notice their habit of spending a whole morning rearranging one page of text with infinite patience at the editing stage. Each writer works in their own way; the test is whether the model takes you to the desired end result of delivering an acceptable manuscript on time.
A book may be in an author’s head for many years before it reaches publication. As an expert in modelling who’s currently refining her own work for publication, Fran suggests that modellers need incredible patience.
She has been working with modellers for over ten years and only now feels she has identified the many structures behind the process of modelling.
Incidentally, she also recognises that every modeller she has met finds being modelled themselves in any modelling methodology other than their own very difficult. ‘They don’t respond to it. Modellers tend to live their model and they are wedded to it,’ she says. Your mental models are central to your identity.
The difference that makes the difference is unlikely to be immediately visible.
Great modellers have tremendous patience and boundless curiosity. Stay curious!
Modelling gives you the ability to raise your game in any field of learning.
It doesn’t promise that you can become an expert and win at everything:
clearly not everyone can be number one in a particular sport or a celebrity film star. However, if you can identify the strategies of excellence in your exemplar and replicate them for yourself, you’re likely to get similar results.
Most encouraging, modelling gives you a practical method to get better and better at what you want to do or be; to open up options for your life and learn in the way that you know best – simply by being with competent people and keeping all your senses awake.
Making Change Easier
In This Chapter
▶ Understanding the structure of change
▶ Discovering the mindset for avoiding change fatigue and staying productive
▶ Maintaining employee engagement through change
▶ Bringing NLP tools together
‘Nothing endures but change’ is an oft-quoted truism. Change can happen in one of two ways:
✓ You can initiate and plan for change. This type of change can be something relatively minor such as buying a new car or getting a new kitchen, or it can be life-changing – for example, when you decide to get married, move house, have kids, or change jobs: in these cases, you feel as if you have some control, although external agencies can throw a spanner in the works and leave you feeling helpless and stressed.
✓ You can have change imposed on you, for example, by your employer or through events such as an unexpected pregnancy or loss of a loved one:
change is harder to accept when you feel as if you’re the victim.
The NLP approach is that no single correct map of change exists at any one time. To survive and thrive, you need to acknowledge and embrace the fact that change is happening and put strategies in place to work with change rather than against it.
Because NLP is about how people think and behave, this chapter focuses on the people aspect of change and not on the project management of change in the workplace. We aim to show you how to deal with change in a way that allows you to maintain your equilibrium through choppy times, whether you initiate the change or a change is imposed on you. Should you come across someone for whom change isn’t going as smoothly as they would like, we hope the insights you gain here enable you to ease their way a little. You could do this as simply as listening sympathetically, by lending a helping hand, or just explaining what they are experiencing.
To do all this, we pull together NLP tools and techniques from the rest of the book to illustrate how you can apply NLP to the changes that happen in your everyday life, be they relatively small or life-changing and whether they are created by you or other people. For example, think about the presupposition,
‘if what you’re doing isn’t working, do something different’ (Chapter 2 covers NLP presuppositions in more detail). Change is all about doing something different when what you’re already doing isn’t working.
The premise in writing this chapter is that whatever the change, you can handle it humanely and compassionately – for example, when dealing with redundancies in a corporation. This chapter is also about enabling you to make change easier for yourself by understanding what you experience.
Instead of beating yourself up, if you think you could have done better at something, you can show yourself some kindness and focus on what you’ve done well.
Keep a notebook to hand, and as you read through this chapter note what you’re going through or how you’re anticipating change, and think about how the change can be made easier by applying specific NLP techniques.
Finding Clarity and Direction
Knowing where you want to go is crucial, because without clear direction you can end up expending a lot of energy chasing what you don’t want and waste a lot of time achieving nothing.
For maximum results, you need to be sure about exactly what outcome you want from the change you choose to create. For example:
✓ I want to weigh 57 kilograms (126 pounds) by 30 September 2010.
✓ Our attrition rate is 27 per cent and we want to reduce that to 15 per cent.
✓ We want to outsource our services.
✓ I want my wedding day to be perfect.
Chapter 4 takes you through the process of getting clarity about your goals and uncovering hidden fears. The examples we use in Chapter 4 are aimed, primarily, at people wanting to create goals in their personal life using the NLP well-formed outcome approach. This useful process is also great, however, for change involving a team or a work department.
Imagine that you’re experiencing change in your work life. You’re a manager who needs to keep a change process on track while making sure that your staff are engaged and motivated (so that productivity loss is kept to a minimum), and also ensure that you can keep yourself upbeat and healthy. The big problem when change like this happens in an organisation is that people feel powerless. The perception of lack of control leads to negative stress and lack of motivation. Very little room exists for manoeuvre in big-change objectives set by top management. The people who have to implement the change can get some sense of control and stay engaged in the change process if they can decide the steps of how to actually put the change in place. Teams and individuals can apply the goal-setting techniques of Chapter 4 and experience less stress.
Take some time out to sit your team around a table and brainstorm any impending changes (and team in this sense can be your family or a larger social group). This process is a good way for the whole team to find out what each other’s concerns are as regards the change. If the team is too big to fit around a table, break the team into several groups and allocate one point to each group. The team then comes together and one group talks about what it discussed, thus bringing more valuable insights.
Understanding the Structure of Change
In order to make change easier to understand, we use two models to illustrate what you may be experiencing and what you may allow for when you find that change is making you feel uncomfortable or making you behave in a way that’s out of character.
The Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle
Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote about the ‘Five Stages of Grief’ in her famous book On Death and Dying. Although originally designed to deal with death, her model is useful in helping to understand change.
You don’t come across this model in standard NLP courses. However, people are fairly familiar with the Kübler-Ross ‘Five Stages of Grief’ as applied specifically to corporate change. The reason we include it here is to pace anyone who doesn’t know much NLP but who has used this model for organisational change, as a lead-in to applying NLP to change.
When change strikes, people try to maintain the status quo because it’s secure and stable. When a change occurs in the status quo of any system, even when it’s expected, people can experience the different stages shown in Figure 20-1. This model can forewarn and forearm you to deal with change more effectively, and help other people in the organisation manage change better. Understanding what you’re going through helps you to manage yourself by managing your emotional state, so Table 20-1 examines these stages further. It offers ways of helping you to behave more resourcefully by having rapport with other people through an awareness of how change is affecting them.
Figure 20-1:
The change curve.
0 1
2
3 4
5
0. Status Quo
1. Shock, anger, freeze 2. Denial
3. Self-awareness 4. Acceptance 5. Experiment
When involved in corporate change, the manager’s job is to keep the dip of the curve as low as possible and to keep the time frame from point 1 (the start of experiencing change) to point 5 (a new status quo begins to emerge) as short as possible, because that gets people back into full performance mode as soon as possible.
Table 20-1 The Stages of Grief in the Change Curve for Change in the Workplace
Stages in the Change Curve
How People May React What Actions Help 1. Shock and
anger
People may procrastinate when they experience shock. Feelings of shock and anger can be fleeting or last for a long time, depending on how resilient someone is. People feel trapped and respond fearfully.
Allow people to let off steam and reassure them that the change is temporary and things are going to get better. Stress that the change is not personal. Subtly work to help people change their map of the world, because people react based on their existing map and the depth of their reaction depends on what their map tells them to do or how to react.
Stages in the Change Curve
How People May React What Actions Help 2. Denial People may have a false
perception about their ability to cope. They may think they can handle things. They think everyone else is to blame.
People can stay here and become dinosaurs who can’t cope with change, which can result in their losing their job or being sidelined.
Coaching helps. The tool is to give feedback, because without feedback people don’t realise that they’re in denial and deluding themselves.
3. Self- awareness
People feel worse as they realise their toolkit of skills and knowledge isn’t good enough to cope with the change. They go into survival mode. The state of feeling bad and inadequate can spill into other areas of people’s lives.
Here people need support and to know where they are on the curve and why they’re feeling bad. People feeling like this need to tell their spouse, colleagues, and manager and ask for leeway to be grumpy and scared. They need to be given permission to feel bad and behave
unresourcefully.
4. Acceptance People start to take personal responsibility for dealing with change as they realise they have finally stopped resisting the change. People’s perception of their abilities is incorrect because they feel useless.
This stage is where people are shown how other people coped with change by giving them case studies, providing coaching and exemplars to model.
5. Experiment This stage is the learning and integrating of new tools, so people start modelling others to see how they deal with change.
They feel more capable and competent.
Training people to acquire new skills and give them room to make mistakes. At this stage, managers must have done sufficient risk analysis and contingency planning, so that mistakes aren’t detrimental to the company. A high-risk management is necessary at this point so that mistakes can be handled and dealt with appropriately. A blame culture only kicks people back to stage 2.
As you emerge from the change, integration then follows. You settle into the new way of doing things and are more flexible because you’ve had to learn to cope with a new environment. Your perception of your own competence rises and is likely to be measured more accurately. The change can be incorporated into the identity of the company by constantly referring back to it, until it becomes unconscious.
People react differently to change. Each person spends different lengths of time at each stage and each person has to be dealt with differently by
team-mates and manager. A manager’s role, therefore, needs to change as they deal with the different stages that different people are at.
When you’re leading or facilitating a team, experiencing the team’s emotions is quite normal. For this reason, managers can feel a rollercoaster of frustration, fear, and anxiety as they experience the different phases themselves. So they may need coaching, mentoring, going for a beer, or whatever their release mechanism is, to gain space and perspective.
When people are under stress, their behaviour may need to be excused.
Before reacting to someone, adopt the second position to, metaphorically,
‘walk in that person’s shoes’ in order to get a better understanding of how the person is feeling (check out Chapter 7 on understanding other people’s perspective). This process gives you the ability to move up and take the bird’s eye view when ‘trouble’s on the ground’.
NLP logical levels
The NLP logical levels are a powerful way to think about change by breaking it down as a model into different categories of information. (Turn to
Chapter 11 for more on logical levels, which are sometimes known as neurological levels.)
As you begin to consider the kind of changes that you experience, you find that logical levels can help you to find a route forward in confusing times.
To do this, having alignment through all the logical levels of identity, belief and values, capabilities and skills, behaviour and environment is particularly important, because having an incongruity at one or more levels stops the desired result from happening. This model can be as useful when experiencing personal change as for understanding corporate change. The model’s key value is that it provides a structured approach for understanding what’s happening. This enables people to make a decision about choosing how they want to feel about the change and how they’re going to behave.
In whichever case, changing at the lower levels of the diagram (see Chapter 11) is easier than at the higher levels. So, for example, a company may find making changes to the building (environment), such as painting the walls a brighter colour, is easier than changing the culture or creating a new identity for itself. Changes like these at a higher level have an impact on people below it; changes at lower levels can impact people above, but this isn’t a given.
Jas, a very bright, well-educated 30-something, booked herself on to a programme of Relationship Wizardry® coaching, as she’d had a series of relationships but she couldn’t settle into anything permanent. Jas is the daughter of very successful parents, and as a result of the coaching, she realised that she’d modelled herself on her strong, very independent mother.
Unfortunately, her identity as a strong, independent woman prevented her from accepting anything from people, and this affected all areas of her life.
She admitted that some of her relationship problems were because she found it hard to accept love and would push her partner away (behaviour) if they came too close emotionally. Jas also realised that she had some self-esteem issues (beliefs) because she didn’t feel she measured up to the success her mother had achieved by the time she was Jas’s age, and she didn’t feel she deserved a successful, dynamic man like her father.
Romilla helped Jas to ‘design’ her ideal relationship using the well-formed outcome process (see Chapter 4). One of the first steps Jas incorporated was to change the environment where she met people. She joined groups where she was more likely to meet people with whom she had interests in common.
Before the coaching, the misalignment through Jas’s logical levels stopped her attaining her goal of a long-term relationship.
Creating alignment in logical levels
Alignment in any venture makes things flow more smoothly and helps you to attain your target more quickly. When you think about the logical levels (see Chapter 11), if you have alignment through all levels, you’re going to find success easy.
Elaine is 45, married with young children, and climbing the IFA (UK’s International Financial Advisors) ladder. She’s extremely bright and very ambitious (one aspect of identity). She’s also passionate about women having an understanding of how to attain financial security (values) and believes in educating women to this end, because she ‘knows’ (belief) that every woman has the right to financial independence.
Elaine has a string of letters after her name (capabilities and skills) but is striving to get more qualifications. This aim is completely congruent with her ambition of where she’s taking her business, and the way she acts and talks about women’s finance (behaviour) engenders complete trust. She has a lovely office at home (environment) where she can keep an eye on her children. When she needs to think, she goes into the garden for a spot of meditation. Because all the areas for her business are aligned, she’s making good progress.
Although this second anecdote is an example of what Jim experienced when his wife died, it can apply to anyone who goes through loss: of a marriage when a split occurs or the loss of a job due to redundancy, sacking, or retirement.
Jim, an accountant, and Alicia had been married for almost 30 years. The first couple of weeks after Alicia died were tied up with making the funeral arrangements and Jim functioned on autopilot, but then he went through huge change:
✓ Environment: Jim found that he was rattling around their bedroom after he took Alicia’s clothes to the charity shop. A bed that had been
comfortable for two felt very big and the king-size quilt was too heavy.
Obviously, depending on the loss, different aspects apply when adjusting to or creating a new environment for a new life.
✓ Behaviour: Jim had always been very playful and men and women enjoyed his company because he was such fun. In fact, Alicia would tease him for being an outrageous flirt. Some months after Alicia died and life began to stabilise, Jim realised that his sense of humour had started to return. He was surprised to notice that his interaction with the women he was meeting had changed dramatically. Although he was his playful self with women who were Alicia’s and his old and trusted friends, he was much more reserved with women he was meeting for the first time. He realised that he’d seen Alicia as a guard against women who may misconstrue his playfulness.
✓ Capabilities and skills: Alicia had managed all the household affairs because she enjoyed the element of control and juggling funds and utilities to get the best rates and deals. Jim didn’t want to think about numbers when he was at home. Suddenly, Jim had to organise the running of the home as well as manage his work.
Jim was extremely organised at work but both Alicia and he had given him tacit permission to be less than organised at home. Jim decided to bring his organisational skills into his life at home; he modelled his time keeping and organisational behaviour at work to manage himself at home (for more on modelling, go to Chapter 19).