We describe limiting decisions in the later section ‘Decisions’.
During a deep relaxation, James remembered, when he was about six, his parents having a discussion about their landlord increasing the rent on their house. He recalled how worried his parents sounded. He realised that he’d formed a belief then that rich people were greedy and bad.
Beliefs
Beliefs are really powerful; they can propel you to the heights of success or drag you to the depths of failure because, to paraphrase Henry Ford,
‘whether you believe you can or whether you believe you can’t . . . you’re right’.
Your beliefs are formed in all kinds of unconscious ways. You learn that you’re gifted from your parents, that you can’t draw from your teacher, that you must support your friends from your peers, and so on. In some cases, as with the teacher, when you’re told that you can’t draw, you delete any oppor- tunities you may have to find out how to draw. After all, one teacher told you that you can’t draw.
Beliefs can start off like a ‘splinter in your mind’ (remember Morpheus talk- ing to Neo in the film The Matrix?) and, as it irritates and niggles, you begin to find instances that validate the splinter and over a period of time you develop a concrete belief.
Choose your beliefs very carefully because they have a tendency to become self-fulfilling prophecies!
Attitudes
Your attitude is your way of thinking about a topic or perhaps a group of people: it tells others how you’re feeling or your state of mind about some- one or something. Your attitude is a filter of which you’re very conscious and is formed by a collection of values, beliefs, and opinions around a particular subject. Changing an attitude is challenging because your conscious mind is actively involved in building and holding on to attitudes.
You can get some awareness of other people’s attitudes from what they say and how they behave. At work, someone who goes the extra mile and has a positive frame of mind is considered to have a good attitude to their work, whereas a dodger or malingerer may be seen as having a bad attitude to work.
Because your attitude is based on your values and beliefs, it affects your abilities by making you behave in certain ways. Someone with a positive atti- tude may always expect to get a positive outcome, and by demonstrating a pleasant and helpful demeanour, that person influences others to behave in a similar vein.
Next time that you’re with someone who’s prone to whingeing, experiment by getting that person to catch your positive attitude virus. If you find someone who is always moaning about paying their taxes, ask them if they’d rather live out of a cardboard box and sleep in a doorway, saying that vagrants definitely don’t pay taxes. If you know someone who regularly moans about Monday mornings and all the work that lies ahead of them, tell them to think of how good Friday afternoon will feel when the work is done. Or if you hear someone backbiting another person, say something positive about the victim. Tell the whiner that people who have a positive attitude to life are less stressed and live longer. You may even get to see your moaning Minnie doing something good and decide to praise them!
Memories
Your memories determine what you anticipate and how you behave and communicate with other people. Memories from your past can affect your present and your future. The problem occurs when your memories don’t stay in the order in which they were recorded. When memories get jumbled up, they bring along all the emotions of when they actually happened. By this we mean that your current experience invokes old memories and you find yourself responding to memories and emotions of the past rather than to the experience you’re currently having.
Tamara worked with a woman called Sheila, and their relationship was unsuc- cessful, to put it mildly. Sheila was a class-A bully who focused her attentions on Tamara. The situation wasn’t helped by the fact that Sheila was Tamara’s supervisor. When a very relieved Tamara found a new job, she found that she was working, in a similar relationship, with another person named Sheila.
Because her new colleague was also called Sheila and was senior to her, Tamara took a lot of convincing that the second Sheila was in fact a lovely person and, until Tamara was able to accept this reality, she was very wary of her. If her memories had stayed in the correct order, Tamara wouldn’t have re-experienced the negative memories and emotions from the past. She made generalisations and distortions about the second Shelia from her experiences with the first.
Decisions
Your decisions are closely linked to your memories and affect all areas of your life. This ability is especially important as regards decisions that limit the options you feel you have in life – what NLP calls limiting decisions.
Examples of limiting decisions include: ‘I can’t spell’, ‘money is the root of all evil, so to be good I mustn’t be rich’, and ‘if I go on a diet I won’t be able to enjoy my food’.
Many of your limiting decisions are made unconsciously, some when you are very young, and may be forgotten. As you grow and develop, your values may change and you need to recognise and reassess any decisions that may be hindering you.
In the earlier section ‘Values’, we tell you about James who worked in Africa for several years. Well, when he returned to England, he was even poorer than a church mouse, because he now had to provide for his family, without the help of the charity for whom he’d worked. On thinking about their circum- stances, he drew up a new hierarchical set of values as follows:
✓ Happiness
✓ Enriching lives
✓ Being with my family
✓ Security
✓ Financial freedom
✓ Variety
When he decided that he needed financial freedom, he realised that the deci- sion he’d made (rich people = greedy = bad) when he was little was hamper- ing him from providing for his family. He thought about how he may be able to earn good money, help people, and stay close to his family. Today, James is extremely happy, very wealthy, and enriching lives. How? He topped up his MSc in Business Management with a PhD in Psychology. He runs workshops around the world, travelling with his wife.
Giving Effective Communication a Try
As the earlier sections in this chapter show, much of the way you think and behave is unconscious; your values, beliefs, memories, and so on, form and impact upon your responses. Fortunately, you don’t have to be at the mercy of your unconscious mind.
With awareness, you can take control of how you communicate with people, which is a liberating and empowering thought in itself! Just keep these point- ers in mind:
✓ Engage your brain before your mouth: Think of the result you want when you’re interacting with people, and speak and behave with that desired outcome in mind.
✓ Tread softly: Having this knowledge gives you power, and of course power can corrupt. On the other hand, power can also free you from fear. Power allows you to work with generosity and kindness, so that with the knowledge of someone else’s model of the world you can come to a win–win conclusion.
Seeing, Hearing, and Feeling Your Way to Better Communication
In This Chapter
▶ Exploring the amazing power of your senses
▶ Getting truly in touch with the world around you
▶ Noticing through their preferred language, how people think differently
▶ Spotting and deciphering people’s eye movements
In Chapter 1, we introduce you to the four main pillars of NLP. One of these upstanding elements is what NLP labels sensory awareness, the ability to understand how people make meaning of the world and create their own real- ity through their senses.
Just for a minute, imagine a special creature with highly developed personal antennae. Well, actually that’s you. You come tumbling into the world as a new human baby ready to discover all about the surrounding world. Unless you’re born with difficulties in some way, you arrive as a mini learning machine with eyes and ears, and a sense of smell, taste, and touch, plus that most distinctly human quality – the ability to experience an emotional con- nection with others.
As you develop, you form mental maps of the world and get into habits of thinking and behaving during childhood. You discover how to learn about the world in certain ways that work best for you, by looking at, touching, tast- ing, and smelling things, and hearing words.
NLP encourages you to become curious about how you form these mental maps. Understanding how you use your senses to represent your experience enables you to notice how your perceptions are shaped, thus influencing your ability to communicate with other people.
Ever heard the term ‘use it or lose it’? Through your life experiences, you become conditioned, which can make you a bit lazy about learning. When you find that you’re good at one way of doing things, that’s the method you continue to use. So, assume that as a child you draw a picture, sing, or dance, and you enjoyed doing so and received positive reinforcement from a teacher.
Clearly, you’re most likely to concentrate more attention on that successful area, in which you show promise, to the detriment of other endeavours.
The same thing can happen with your sensory awareness. You get very good at using one method of thinking, processing, and indeed, sharing information in a particular context, until it becomes more natural to focus consciously on that one sense to the detriment of the others. You use your other senses, of course, but aren’t consciously aware of them. For example, when you watch a film in vivid 3D, you may not be as aware of the soundtrack as the visual images in front of your eyes.
Leonardo da Vinci mused that the average human ‘looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fra- grance, and talks without thinking.’
What an invitation for personal improvement!
In this chapter, we invite you to try out some new ways of engaging with the world, fine-tuning your incredible senses, and noticing what a difference doing so makes to your life. You can look forward to fun and self-discovery along the way.
Getting to Grips with the Senses
The NLP model describes the way that you experience the external world – which by the way is called real life – through your five senses, of sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.
Notice what happens inside your head and body, for example, when we write:
‘Think about a delicious meal you’ve enjoyed.’ You may see a picture of the table spread with colourful dishes, hear the sound of knives and forks, a waiter telling you about today’s specials, or a friend chatting in the kitchen.
Perhaps you notice a warm and pleasant anticipation inside as the aromas of food drift your way, you hear the uncorking of a bottle of wine or feel a cool glass of water in your hand, and then you taste the first mouthful: a delicious, multi-sensory experience. And you’re only thinking about it.
Until now you may not have thought about how you think (the process), only what you think about (the content). However, the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your experience. So the how is just as important, if
This section introduces you to some dimensions of your thought processes that you may never have considered before. As you open up your own aware- ness as to how you think and make sense of the world, some interesting things happen. You begin to notice that you can control how you think about a person or situation. You also realise that not everybody thinks like you do about even the most mundane, everyday events, which seem so clear and obvious to you. You may well decide that life can be more rewarding when you begin to think differently by paying attention to different senses.
Filtering reality
As you experience reality, you selectively filter information from your envi- ronment in three broad ways, known in NLP as visual, auditory, and kinaes- thetic, or VAK for short (or VAKOG if you include the olfactory and gustatory aspects):
✓ Visual dimension: Some people see clear pictures of the sights.
✓ Auditory dimension: Other people tune in to hear the sounds.
✓ Kinaesthetic dimension: A third group grasp the emotional aspects or touch – they experience a body awareness (for our purposes we include in this group the sense of smell (olfactory) and taste (gustatory)).
Think for a moment about the way you experience using this For Dummies book. Everybody who picks it up notices the look, sound, and feel in different ways. Take three individual readers. The first one chooses the book because of the friendly layout and amusing cartoons. The second likes the sound of what’s said and discussed in the text. The third enjoys the feel or smell of the paper or has a gut feeling that this book is interesting to get hold of. Perhaps you experience the book as a mix of all three senses.
Check it out for yourself. As you use this book, start to notice how you prefer to take in information. Begin to check which pages make you sit up and pay attention. What works best for you? Are you most influenced by the words, the pictures, or the feel?
In everyday life, you naturally access all your VAK senses. However, in any particular context, one sense may dominate for you. As you become more sensitive to the three broad groupings of visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic at work and play, we promise that you’re going to benefit from this exercise.
Imagine, for example, that you want to change a room in your home. You may have been thinking about this task in purely visual terms – what paint colours to choose or patterns for the fabrics. If you begin to engage in the auditory dimension, you may think about the sounds of objects in the room, those squeaky floorboards, the music or conversations you want to take place, and how to cut out the noise of the external traffic or let in the birdsong. Or what
happens if you consider this space in terms of textures – the kinaesthetic dimension? Perhaps then you choose a plush, velvety carpet or rush matting.
You may expose some brickwork or prefer a new smooth plaster finish on the walls, depending on the feel that appeals to you.
In the context of learning, when you know about VAK you can start to experi- ment with different ways of taking in information. Say, in the past you’ve studied a language by listening to CDs in your car. Perhaps now you may make faster progress by watching foreign films or plays instead, or by play- ing sport, sharing a meal, or learning a dance routine with native speakers of that language. When people discover how to develop their abilities to access pictures, words, and feelings, they often discover talents of which they were previously unaware.
When Kate began to learn Italian from her friend Paola in Abruzzo, she ini- tially wanted to see everything written down in order to remember what she’d heard spoken; and she felt she had to learn the vocabulary by rote.
Paola encouraged her to relax on a comfortable sofa after each lesson, listen to what she had practised earlier, and allow the words to sink in naturally.
This approach saved Kate from getting anxious about how she was going to remember everything and made the experience fun.
As a teacher who has studied NLP, Paola recognises two important things:
pupils learn best when in a resourceful state; and all pupils have their own natural learning style.
A resourceful state is one in which you’re able to be open, curious to learn, and able to access all the resources you need to solve any problem you’re deal- ing with. The resources you access may be internal – such as your natural attributes of a desire to learn – or external – including other people or techni- cal gadgets. In a resourceful state, you have a sense that you’re behaving ‘at cause’ where you have choices, rather than ‘at effect’ where you feel power- less and that life is something being done to you.
In ‘NLP-speak’, the different channels through which humans represent or code information internally using their senses are known as the representa- tional systems, also called the modalities. (In NLP, speaking about the visual modality is the equivalent of speaking of the visual representational system.) You can also hear NLPers talk about rep systems for short, VAK preferences, or preferred thinking styles. Visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic make up the main representational systems. The submodalities are the characteristics of each representational system, such as colour and brightness (visual), pitch and tone (auditory), and pressure and temperature (kinaesthetic).
The sensory-specific words (such as ‘picture’, ‘word’, ‘feeling’, ‘smell’, or
‘taste’) that we employ – whether they’re nouns, verbs, or adjectives – are called the predicates. More examples of these predicates are given in Table 6-1, which you can find in the later section ‘Building rapport through words’.
Hearing how people are thinking
Human beings naturally blend a rich and heady mix of the VAK dimensions, and yet people tend to have a preference for one modality over the others.
How do you decide whether you or others have a preference for the visual, auditory, or kinaesthetic dimension? To discover more about your primary modality, try out the following fun quiz on yourself and with friends and col- leagues – we don’t claim that the test’s scientific, but it takes only a couple of minutes to do:
1. For each of the following statements, circle the option that best describes you.