Keep people moving fairly promptly: they can always come around twice. When you’ve captured your brainstorming answers, the next step is to sift and work through the information you’ve gathered to spot pat- terns and new ideas to build on your strengths as a team.
Driving Habits: Uncovering Your Secret Programs
In This Chapter
▶ Understanding the psychology behind your habits and behaviours
▶ Using strategies to improve communication
▶ Applying knowledge of strategies to overcome road rage
▶ Discovering how to spell well
When you wake up in the morning, do you brush your teeth first or shower first? Like everyone else, you have a strategy – in this case, a sequence of steps – for carrying out your routine tasks, whether you’re cut- ting a loaf of bread, washing your hands, or completing your tax return. And like many other people, you may not even be aware that you do things on automatic pilot.
A strategy is any internal and external set or order of experiences that consis- tently produces a specific outcome.
When Romilla was studying yoga, her teacher Swami Ambikananda asked the class to gain a greater understanding of the unconscious rituals that we use.
She suggested that we start our day by changing the regular sequence we have for getting dressed, eating breakfast, and preparing to go to work. Boy did that scramble the brain! Real concentration was necessary to keep the rest of the day running smoothly. Romilla felt as if she had forgotten some- thing crucial and her brain kept trying to remember what it was. The overall experience was very uncomfortable.
You use your personal strategies for all sorts of behaviours: feeling loved;
loving your partner, parent, child, or pet; hating someone; getting irritable with someone; buying your favourite perfume; learning to drive; and succeed- ing and failing in health, wealth, and happiness, and so on.
Perhaps you ask yourself from time to time, ‘Why am I successful in some areas of my life and not as successful in others?’ Well, you may find that you’re simply using less-effective strategies in those less-successful areas.
The great thing is that when you realise that you’re running a strategy, you can more easily develop the tools to change those strategies that are less effective. Even better, you can find someone else’s strategy that works well and copy it!
In this chapter you discover the mechanics behind your behaviours, and armed with this information you can add, modify, or delete your strategies to put you in the driving seat of your life.
The Evolution of Strategies
The NLP strategy model came about through a process of evolution. It started with behavioural psychologists such as Watson, Skinner, and Pavlov and was enhanced by Miller, Galanter, and Pribram, who were cognitive psy- chologists, before being refined by NLP’s founding fathers, Grinder
and Bandler.
The S–R model
Back in the early part of the 20th century, behavioural psychologists based their work on the study of human and animal behaviour. They proposed that people either respond to a stimulus or develop a response through condi- tioning or reinforcement. The most famous of the studies was that of Pavlov and his dogs. The dogs heard a bell that they associated with the arrival of food (stimulus) and therefore salivated (response). Ultimately, the dogs sali- vated merely at the sound of the bell (without the food). A behaviourist may argue that humans simply respond to stimuli in a similar way. For example, when John’s baby gurgles and smiles (stimulus), John feels a warm glow (response), or when Mark sees a homeless person on the pavement (stimu- lus), he reaches for spare coins in his pocket (response).
Although behaviourist ideas remain influential in modifying behaviour, most people generally agree that humans have more sophisticated powers of thought.
The TOTE model
Miller, Galanter, and Pribram built on the S–R model of behaviourism and presented the TOTE (Test, Operate, Test, Exit) model, which is illustrated in Figure 12-1. The TOTE model works on the principle that you have a goal in
mind when you exhibit a particular behaviour. The purpose of your behav- iour is to get as close to your desired outcome as possible. You test your strategy in order to assess whether you’ve reached your goal. If your goal is reached, you stop the behaviour and exit the strategy. If the goal isn’t reached, you modify the behaviour and repeat it, thereby incorporating a simple feedback and response loop. So, if your outcome is to boil the kettle, the test is whether the kettle has boiled; if it hasn’t, you carry on waiting for it to boil, test for the kettle having boiled, and when it has you exit the strategy.
Figure 12-1:
The TOTE model.
TEST:
Has your goal been achieved?
YES Exit
NO Loop around
OPERATE:
If your goal hasn’t been achieved, modify your behaviour.
The NLP strategy = TOTE + modalities
NLP suggests that you experience the world primarily through your five senses: visual (eyes), auditory (ears), kinaesthetic (feelings and touch), olfac- tory (smell), and gustatory (taste). These senses are your representational (rep) systems, also called modalities, which you can read more about in Chapter 6.
Submodalities are the different qualities that combine to make up modalities.
For example, if you create a picture in your mind’s eye, you’re using your visual representative system or modality. You adjust the qualities or submo- dalities of the picture by making it bigger, brighter, or bringing it closer to you. You can discover much more about your submodalities and how they affect the way you experience your world in Chapter 10.
Bandler and Grinder included modalities and submodalities into the Test and Operate phases of the TOTE model, refining it further to create the NLP strategy model. According to Bandler and Grinder, the goal you have when you initiate a strategy to achieve a specific goal, and the means by which you assess whether or not it has been achieved, is dependent on combinations of your personal modalities. For example, when you think of your goal, you may make a picture of it, create a sound that you hear in your head, or get a feeling.
The success of your strategy ties into the success of your goal and you judge success by whether or not you feel, hear, or see what you imagined you would through the submodalities.
The NLP strategy model in action
This section shows how the NLP strategy model works for someone enacting a basic road-rage strategy. The TOTE model (take a look at Figure 12-1 in the earlier section, ‘The TOTE model’) is enriched by adding modalities to give you the NLP strategy model, which can be used to understand how someone operates a particular pattern of behaviour.
Figure 12-2 illustrates the process in action. Here’s how the NLP strategy model works:
Figure 12-2:
The NLP strategy model.
TEST T
OPERATE
TEST C
EXIT
YES