Always check your motives when setting and obtaining your goals, in order to ensure that they fit within all areas of your life, as we describe in Chapter 4. This process is called the ecology check. By really examining your rea- sons, you can ensure that no hidden negative emotions are driving you. For instance, if you’re focusing on making a lot of money, you may want to know that the desire stems from wanting to be comfortably secure and able to help those less fortunate than yourself, and not because you’re trying to escape a poverty-stricken childhood.
Checking your motives also helps you to identify any lurking, unconscious fears, for example: ‘If I’m rich, people will only want to be friends because of my money, not because they like me.’ Analysing these motives fully helps you to crystallise your exact reasons for your desire and allows you to take steps to overcome any unconscious issues.
Smooth Running below Decks
In This Chapter
▶ Finding out that parts of your unconscious mind may be in conflict
▶ Discovering how to overcome self-sabotaging behaviour
▶ Experimenting with integrating parts of the unconscious mind
▶ Extrapolating personal conflict resolution to teams and organisations
Can you remember participating in or watching a tug-of-war? Both sides expend an inordinate amount of energy but don’t manage to move very far. Conflict, whether within yourself or with someone else, is like a tug-of-war with two sides pulling in opposite directions and getting nowhere.
Conflict within yourself usually occurs between a conscious part of your mind and an unconscious part. Phrases such as ‘I don’t know what came over me’, ‘I just wasn’t myself’, ‘part of me wants . . . and another part wants. . .’
provide a clue to parts of your unconscious mind; parts of which you may be unaware. Take the example of a person who knows at a conscious level that smoking’s bad for their health and yet continues to smoke because unconsciously they crave the companionship of their friends, most of whom smoke.
The NLP Encyclopedia of Systemic NLP and NLP New Coding (which you can access at www.nlpu.com) defines conflict as follows: ‘Psychologically, con- flict is a mental struggle, sometimes unconscious, resulting when different representations of the world are held in opposition or exclusivity.’ In other words, conflict occurs when two maps of the world collide. By reconciling these two different maps, you can eliminate the conflict. This chapter shows you how.
Getting to Grips with a Hierarchy of Conflict
Conflict can take place at different levels of a hierarchy, known as logical levels, as follows:
✓ Identity
✓ Values and beliefs
✓ Capabilities and skills
✓ Behaviour
✓ Environment
When you’re considering some of the conflicts you face, understanding the level at which you need to engage is helpful. For example, if as a manager you believe that people are what make your company a success but you focus more on developing your technology than your people, you may need to modify your behaviour to bring it into line with the needs of your staff and ultimately with your beliefs.
The levels of this hierarchy are also referred to as neurological levels because they connect with your thinking processes and therefore the brain and its interaction with your body. (You can find out all about logical levels in Chapter 11.) These neurological levels operate in a hierarchy – like the rungs on a ladder – with identity at a higher rung and environment down below.
When you can identify the real logical level at which you’re working, the conflict becomes easier to resolve.
Here are some examples of the conflicts you may face at the different logical levels:
✓ Identity: Often you have many roles to play in your life and work that pull you in different directions. You may want to be a good parent as well as a committed employee, or a nice, likeable person as well as a profitable manager. Perhaps you’re trying to be a supportive son or daughter or a volunteer in the local community, as well as an interna- tional jet-setter.
✓ Values and beliefs: Sometimes you have a mix of beliefs that don’t seem to fit well together or match your values. You may want to be happy, and yet part of you doesn’t believe that you deserve happiness. You may value both health and wealth but not believe that getting them both at the same time is possible. You may value family life and global busi- ness success and be struggling to see how these items can fit together, because you have no role models of these two values sitting side by side as equals.
✓ Capabilities and skills: You may have a mix of great skills and abilities and yet you can’t find a way to use them all in a way that satisfies you.
So perhaps you struggle to find a job that satisfies your desire to build or make things with your own hands at the same time as employing your skills at managing a team of other people in order to pay the mortgage.
You may be a great musician and also a qualified medic, but have to make a choice of where to put your energy.
✓ Behaviour: You can find yourself engaging in behaviour that doesn’t seem to help you to achieve your goals. For example, have you ever had an important piece of work to do and spent hours tidying out your desk or a cupboard instead? Or maybe you wanted to diet and found that a piece of buttered toast somehow ended up in your mouth without you noticing how it got there.
✓ Environment: At times you may find yourself in a dilemma about the places where you hang out or the people with whom you spend time.
Maybe you’re mixing with the wrong sort of people – people who don’t seem to have your best interests at heart or that your family disap- proves of. Maybe part of you wants to move away from home and set up on your own; or perhaps part of you wants to live in the country of your birth while another part of you yearns to explore the world. You want to be in two places simultaneously and can’t settle in either one.
As soon as you hear yourself or others say phrases such as ‘part of me wants . . . and yet another part of me wants. . .’, you can be sure that an inter- nal conflict’s going on that defies logical reasoning.
You’re in total harmony with yourself when each of your logical levels is aligned with the others. Personal conflict occurs when what you’re trying to achieve, or what you believe, or perhaps what you’re doing is out of kilter with other levels in the hierarchy. So if you want to satisfy a goal to earn a high salary, this aim may conflict with your identity of ‘I’m a good husband and father’, because you don’t get to spend time with your loved ones.
Conflict resolution is achieved by brainstorming and asking questions of yourself and the people affected by your decisions about how you can come up with novel ways that may allow you to fulfil your goal and align your logi- cal levels.
Drifting from Wholeness to Parts
Your memories are arranged into a pattern, or Gestalt, that’s an association of related memories. A Gestalt may start when you experience an event that first triggers an emotional response, a Significant Emotional Event (SEE).
A useful way to think about this concept is to start from the premise that at some point your unconscious mind is a complete whole. When you experi- ence an SEE, a part is created and a boundary forms around this part of your unconscious mind, separating it from the rest of the unconscious mind.
This part functions like a ‘mini you’, with its own personality and values and beliefs. Just like the ‘conscious you’, this part exhibits behaviours that have purpose and intent. Unfortunately, the behaviours can be in conflict with the actual intention of the part. For example, a person who believes they were never loved as a child may develop shoplifting tendencies because the unconscious part craves attention, even though this kind of attention isn’t what the person really wants.
Understanding a part’s intentions
A major NLP presupposition is that every behaviour has a positive intent.
For example, the positive intent behind someone smoking a cigarette may be to relax. (Head to Chapter 2 for more on the main NLP presuppositions.) Sometimes the behaviour that your unconscious part makes you exhibit doesn’t satisfy your underlying need.
Perhaps an alcoholic drinks to numb the pain (positive intent) of being aban- doned by their spouse. The unconscious part is in fact crying out for love, but the manifested behaviour – drinking heavily – doesn’t satisfy the underly- ing need. The answer to this problem lies in identifying and understanding the real need and satisfying it in a positive way. So if the alcoholic can come out of their stupor and recognise that alcohol isn’t what they need but love is, they may dry out, clean up, learn the lessons from their failed marriage, and pick themselves up to find love.
Getting to the heart of the problem
Often a part of your unconscious mind can create problems for you. The rea- sons for these problems can be hard to understand logically. For example, you may suddenly develop a fear of an everyday activity like travelling or meeting people. You can reach the real, hidden purpose behind the intention of the part by peeling back and exploring each reason or intention as it sur- faces. When you arrive at the true, underlying purpose of the part, you can then assimilate this purpose into the bigger whole of your unconscious mind.
The following anecdote illustrates what can happen when your unconscious mind drives the motivation of one part. Later in this chapter, in the section
‘Trying the visual squash technique’, you discover how to integrate two parts that are in conflict.
Oliver is a very successful business school graduate who had his career mapped out. He knew what he wanted to achieve and the time scales in which he would meet his goals. He was thrilled when he was promoted to his dream job as Vice President of Planning and Strategy in a major global corporation.
Just as he was about to embark on a tour of the European sites, disaster struck. Oliver started waking up in the night with heart palpitations, breath- lessness, and cold sweats. His doctor confirmed that nothing was physically wrong with Oliver.
In talking through possible reasons for his condition with his NLP coach, Oliver identified several issues connected with the promotion: he would be away from home for longer periods; he would be living in hotels; and he would be spending less time playing sport, something he was passionate about. Oliver and his coach explored each of the layers of objections that were presented and discarded them as superficial reasons for his health issues.
During a state of deep relaxation, Oliver recalled a memory of, in his words,
‘failing’ at maths as a young boy. Oliver’s teacher and parents had very high expectations of Oliver and he felt that he’d let them down when he didn’t meet the stringent exam standards. Oliver realised that, although the promo- tion gave him the opportunity to work at his ideal job, it was very high profile and his unconscious mind was trying to protect him from the humiliation of yet another failure. To do so, it was creating the physical problems that would ultimately get in the way of Oliver succeeding at his dream job.
By working with his NLP coach, Oliver realised that his parents and teacher had pushed him beyond his level of capability and set him up for failure.
Oliver recognised that he had succeeded at his career on the merits of his abilities and he had what was necessary to be an outstanding success. He discovered that making mistakes and encountering failure was all right, as long as he was flexible enough to learn from the setbacks and use the lessons positively to move forward.
While achieving what you want in your career or a project close to your heart, you may hit a brick wall. Find yourself a quiet space and some time to explore the ways in which you may be creating barriers to your own success.
Help! I’m in Conflict with Myself
Self-sabotage is one of the symptoms you can experience when different con- scious and unconscious parts of you are in conflict, where every attempt you make to reach a goal is subverted by one of the parts. We detail two of the most common methods of self-sabotage you need to keep an eye out for in this section.
Listening to your unconscious mind
As with any communication, if you understand that self-sabotage is just your unconscious mind’s way of trying to communicate with you, you can assist it by examining the positive intention behind the behaviour that’s stopping you from achieving your goal. You can then substitute the self-defeating behaviour with something more positive, which satisfies the intent of the unconscious mind. For instance, the smoker who wants to stop but contin- ues smoking because unconsciously they crave the companionship of their friends who smoke, can satisfy their need for friendship by developing a new group of non-smoking friends or by undertaking a new activity that helps them develop a circle of friends with a healthier lifestyle.
Taking sides
When two parts of your unconscious mind are in conflict, the chances are that your conscious mind sides with one part or the other, making a judge- ment that one’s bad and suppressing it by sheer force of will. The result is similar to what happens when you squeeze a balloon. If the balloon isn’t blown up to capacity, as you squeeze one end the air pushes the balloon out in another direction. If the balloon is filled to capacity, you just get a bang as you squeeze. Similarly, as you suppress a part of you, the suppressed part shows up as an aberrant behaviour, physical symptom (balloon distortion), or a breakdown (the bang).
Fiona suffered so badly from eczema that she kept her body well covered.
In therapy, she came to realise that the symptoms were a consequence of having been bullied at school, where all she ever wanted to do was hide.
Now her unconscious mind, in its own unique way, was presenting her with a means to hide.
In Fiona’s case the part that wanted to hide her from the bullies created a physical symptom, which meant she had to keep her body covered. After the therapy brought conscious awareness, previously failed medical treatments worked well. However, the eczema does flare up when Fiona is under stress, so she has developed strategies (see Chapter 12 for more on strategies) to manage her time and energy better.
Becoming Whole: Integrating Your Parts
Not all parts of the unconscious mind are in conflict with each other. You become aware of the ones that are in conflict, however, when you encounter problems such as wanting to be healthy and still craving cigarettes, or want- ing to be slim but not being able to control binge-eating. You can deal with
More unconscious parts mean more potential for conflict, and therefore the ideal is to aspire to complete wholeness. For example, when more than two parts are involved, you can integrate them in pairs. In this section, we describe two of the more common techniques for integrating conflicting parts: the visual squash and reframing.
Trying the visual squash technique
In principle, this exercise involves identifying the parts involved in a conflict and discovering their common intention before integrating them.
As you work to integrate your parts, keep these tips in mind:
✓ Strive to turn a negative answer into a positive outcome. For example, if you want to do more exercise, and you get the negative answer ‘I don’t want to spend too much time exercising,’ carry on towards a positive outcome, such as ‘I want to exercise to fit in with my lifestyle.’
✓ Work with a qualified NLP practitioner or partner who can record your answers and prompt you with them.
Sue wanted to overcome her resistance to exercising. She did the following exercise with her friend, Gillian. The part that Sue placed on her right hand was a young child who was carefree, spontaneous, and very playful. Some of the things important to the child were freedom, playfulness, joy, and laughter, with fun being the most important. The part of Sue’s unconscious that she placed on her left hand was a rather dark, dour, elderly male whose prime concern was safety. During the exercise, Sue had no trouble working with the child’s hierarchy of intentions (see point 7 in the following exercise).
However, when she came to work with the male part of her unconscious, Sue kept forgetting what she’d said for the earlier step and found it very helpful to have Gillian repeat her exact words to her. Because Sue didn’t feel an affinity with the male part of her unconscious, she resisted ‘his’ responses and found having Gillian to hand very helpful.
The result of doing this exercise was that Sue realised that a part of her unconscious mind was nervous that if she exercised and got really healthy, she would stop treating her body with care. As soon as Sue became aware, consciously, of the purpose of each part, both parts discovered that their highest purpose was success.
For this exercise to be successful you have to find out what the common inten- tion is for each part before you try and integrate them. A useful idea is to talk to the parts and have them acknowledge that each part has a positive inten- tion for the other and that their conflict is stopping both parts from achieving their common purpose.