by Tom Hoobyar
The book is divided into two sections. The first one (Chapters 1–4) focuses on you—how your mind works and changes you can make to feel even more confident and energized. The second section concentrates on your interactions with others and how these can be easier and more rewarding.
Section 2 builds on the first section and enables you to apply what you’ve learned to other people, not just to yourself. This doesn’t mean that you’re changing or “fixing” someone else. (After all, it’s inadvisable to do that without their permission.) It simply means that the same NLP concepts that helped you understand how you “work” can help you understand other people. That new understanding enables you to make different choices about interacting with them—hopefully, in a way that’s more in line with your desired outcome.
Each chapter is a bit like a conversation where I’ll introduce different NLP concepts and share examples that illustrate how these ideas are important. The Discovery Activities give you an opportunity to explore these concepts as they relate to you and changes you might like to make. After many of these activities, I’ve provided an Internet link where you can access a demo of that process or easily get additional information.
At the end of each chapter, there’s a quick summary of Key Ideas, as well as a URL link and QR code to access a list of Bonus Activities and additional examples that will help you enhance your understanding and NLP skills. The two blank pages at the very end of each chapter offer you a place to capture your thoughts and list future things you’d like to work on with the concepts you learned during that part of the book.
In the final chapter, I’ve included highlights from the book and processes you will have learned. To help you determine what next steps you want to take to strengthen your NLP knowledge and skills, I’ve provided an easy 21-Day Guide and a link to a list of my favorite NLP resources. My goal is to make becoming an NLP power user easy and fun so you can create an even better life.
As I mentioned in the Introduction, NLP is more important today than ever before because, in this world of ever-evolving technology, we are constantly connecting—with people we work with, people we love, and people who have information and/or access to others. We’re so busy responding, that we hardly have time to think.
One final note for this chapter. NLP is a robust and evolving technology, so no book is all-inclusive. This one focuses on key concepts and strategies that lend themselves to a self-study format. It also focuses on you! Here’s why. Because NLP was initially designed as brief therapy, many available resources target helping other people make desired changes.
Yet, after years of working with NLP masters and trainees, it’s clear to me that most people really want to use these powerful tools to help themselves. Using NLP to become a better you isn’t a selfish thing—like putting on your oxygen mask first during an airplane emergency, it’s purely practical. There are two reasons. First of all, changing yourself is within your control. Second, when you change any variable in an equation, the results change. As you change yourself, you’ll notice how—without a word—people around you shift in response. This phenomenon is fascinating and is likely to inspire you to make more changes!
So turn the page, and let’s start to explore more about how you think, and the amazing things you can do when you choose to “customize” your thinking.
Key Ideas
• Our brains interpret the sensory input we get, and assign a meaning to it. As soon as a meaning is assigned, it leads to an emotion. This is unconscious, and fast, so that we have the stimulus and the emotion. The rest is out of awareness.
• When we learn, we generalize. Because we had some experiences in the past that seem similar, we generalize and automate; it’s an efficiency strategy.
• Generalization is also how beliefs get formed; then beliefs filter all the different stimuli coming in. The mind doesn’t really get raw information; it no longer gets to choose.
• Deletion is when the mind ignores specific sensory input.
• Distortion is changing an experience from what it actually is to some modified form of it.
• Each of us is a blend of body, brain, and mind.
• The world inside someone’s mind is based on five languages: sight, sound, smell, taste, and feeling.
• The world each person sees and lives in is really the world inside their head.
• People often favor one sense or “rep mode” over the others so they are more visual . . . more auditory . . . or more kinesthetic.
• What people remember is a moving target; it shifts each time someone calls up a memory.
• Our minds can recall what we specifically experienced and combine remembered elements to create new imagined experiences and ideas—which are critical to change and innovation.
• Consciously using mental sticky notes (anchors) is a powerful way to strengthen positive mental “states” and diminish negative ones.
• Of the NLP Presuppositions, this book touches on the following ones:
> Experience has structure. It consists of sensory impressions. Some are internally generated and others come from the outside world. That blend, plus the meanings we add, makes up our individual experience.
> People are like mapmakers. We make internal representations (“maps”) of personal experiences. People’s maps are made up of pictures, sounds, feelings, smells, and tastes. These are the “languages of the senses” that our brains use to record our experiences.
> The map is not the territory. Each of us creates a personal map. It’s our world, not THE world.
> People respond to their maps of reality, not to reality itself. All thought—memories, recall, imaginings, daydreams, fantasies—can be called maps. They’re what we respond to.
> If you change someone’s map, their emotional state will change. To all of us, the map IS the experience. Maps are the source of emotions and beliefs. Our feelings change when our maps do.
> Some maps are out of awareness. We are unaware of some of the maps that we have made; it takes language skills and sensory acuity to identify these maps. They are in the unconscious.
> Behind every behavior is a positive intention. When we seek the “outcome behind the behavior,” we will find a universally shared need, like love, safety, self-respect, etc.
> There is no such thing as an inner enemy. Yet there are frequently clumsy or misguided “inner friends” who have positive intentions for us but tend to repeat inappropriate or outdated patterns of behavior.
> Choice is better than no choice. No choice means slavery or robotic behavior. Having choices in any situation gives each of us the freedom to change and grow. Choice gives us more “clicks on the dial.”
> People always make the best choices available to them at the time. We do the best we can in the moment and we might be happier and more effective if we had more choices available to us.
> A system’s most flexible element has the most influence. When we have more choices, we have more influence and more ways to get our desired outcome.
> The meaning of any communication is the response it gets. Communication is not a solo act. It doesn’t matter what our intentions are; communication is defined by the reaction it gets.
> People work perfectly to produce the results they are getting. If our results are not satisfactory, we can learn to develop more choices so we can get different results.
> Every behavior is useful in some context. Every capability exists for some useful reason.
> Anyone can do anything that anyone else can do. Since all human nervous systems are similar (except in the case of actual physical or mental limitations), we can model and learn each other’s skills and attitudes. “Monkey see, monkey do.”
> Chunking: using small chunks to learn big stuff. People learn easily by breaking big subjects into small chunks. For example, these presuppositions are easy to learn, if considered a few at a time.
> People already have all the resources they need. We either have the
experience in our memory banks or we are capable of successfully imagining it. Then we can use it where it’s needed.
> There is no such thing as failure, only feedback. We are always producing a result; if it’s not what we want, we can use the unwanted result as feedback to guide us in experimenting with other choices.
> The quality of our lives is determined by the quality of our communications. How we communicate with ourselves creates our personal experience and how we communicate with others determines the way we are treated throughout our lives.
> Mind and body are part of the same system and they affect each other. What each of us thinks affects our individual physiology, as well as our health, and what we do to our bodies affects our feelings and thoughts.
> Communication is redundant. People are simultaneously communicating in all three systems—visual, auditory, kinesthetic.
> Positive change comes from adding resources. NLP helps us add choices; it doesn’t delete.
> If what you are doing isn’t working, try anything else. If we keep experimenting, we aren’t guaranteed success, but we can sure stack the odds. The only way to fail is to quit trying!
To enhance the skills you learned in this chapter, check out the recommended Bonus Activities at our special “Essential Guide” website: http://eg.nlpco.com/1-4 or use the QR code with your phone.
Discoveries, Questions, Ideas, and Stuff You Want to Work On
CHAPTER TWO: MANAGING YOUR MIND
Who’s driving the bus?
A man who has control over his mind
is able to realize its full potential.
—The Sama Veda
Because few of us understand how our brains and minds work, we don’t really take charge. We don’t really know what pictures, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells are in our brains and minds, let alone how that information is impacting us right now. Here’s the deal. The brain operates pretty much on its own, doing its job to process information and keep us alive. In contrast, the mind is able to focus on more than just survival; it affords us the opportunity to create and choose from a myriad of options.
In this chapter, we’re going to explore the way our brains make sense of the world, how to fine-tune that process, and how to deal with things that cause an emotional reaction and pull us off our desired course, so we can better navigate our personal journeys.
Where Do You Want to Go? Outcome Frames
Imagine this. Someone gets into a taxi and the driver asks, “Where to?” and the passenger says, “Don’t take me to the airport.” It sounds silly and yet it’s how many of us navigate our lives. It’s hard to get where we want to go when we’re not completely clear or congruent about where that is. It’s easy to wind up somewhere we don’t want to be and wonder how we got there, isn’t it?
So first, we need to know what we want: we need an “Outcome.” What’s an outcome? It’s something you desire that’s achievable, appropriate, and measurable. It’s easy to mistake a desire that’s a social influence for one that is personal. Maybe you do want a private jet, but maybe what you really want is just to be able to travel more easily. Owning and maintaining a personal jet is pretty expensive, and there are many other easier ways to travel.
One of the most essential NLP processes is the Outcome Frame, because it carefully and thoroughly addresses the elements that make up a worthwhile goal that truly serves you. Leslie Cameron, one of the codevelopers of NLP, explains it this way:
The Outcome Frame is a set of questions that orient your thinking to maximize the possibility of your getting what you want and being glad that you got it. It’s actually an orientation, a way of perceiving experience as a set of choices. Rather than addressing the issue of why a problem exists, it organizes experience around what is wanted, and how it is possible to achieve it.
In NLP, there is an ongoing presupposition that if it’s possible for one person in the world to do something, it’s possible for anyone to do it; it’s only a question of how.
The “how” orientation of the Outcome Frame makes it possible to turn the inevitable setbacks and stumblings that you experience into valuable feedback. As long as you have a specified outcome that you are holding constant, and know that it is possible to attain, a setback is simply something that happens along the way towards your outcome. The things you do that take you towards your outcome let you know you are on the right track. Those that are disappointing indicate only that what you are doing to attain your outcome is not useful and that you need to change your tack.
Once I learned to use the Well-Formed Outcome, I wondered how I ever got along without it. It’s so simple and effective that you can apply it to anything you want. It’s especially helpful when you’re planning big changes, find yourself stuck, or when you simply want to fine-tune a goal you have or are pursuing. Let’s review the key questions and conditions of a Well-Formed Outcome and then you’ll have an opportunity to apply them, using a simple worksheet, to an outcome that you want.
The Well-Formed Outcome involves the following six questions, which we’ll explore one at a time, using the sample goal of wanting to feel more persuasive.
• What specifically do you want?
• How will you know when you’ve achieved what you want?
• Under what circumstances, where, when, and with whom, do you want to have this result?
• What stops you from having your desired outcome already?
• What resources will you need to help you create what you want?
• How are you going to get there—and what’s the first step to begin to achieve this result?
1. WHAT SPECIFICALLY DO YOU WANT?
W. Clement Stone said, “All personal achievement starts in the mind of the individual. The first step is to know exactly what your problem, goal or desire is.” Using the Well-Formed Outcome, a goal must be: stated in positive terms, chosen by you and within your control, described in a sensory-specific way, and have a manageable size or scope—which we call “Chunk Size” in NLP. (Common NLP terms are described in the glossary at the back of the book.)
Here we go. Imagine that you wanted to feel more persuasive. Remember, if your goal is to feel more persuasive, you can’t state it as “I don’t want to feel pushy” or “I don’t want to seem like a know-it-all.” These aren’t really goals at all. They’re simply a statement of what you don’t want. It’s too vague to ever know if you had attained it. It’s also very hard for the brain to work with negatives. How do you not think of a purple elephant? First, you have to think of it and then try not to think of it. That’s just a big waste of energy. So every time you think, “I don’t want to be pushy,” you first have to think of being pushy. The only way to stop that thought is to think of something else. So why not just go for what you do want, directly?
And you have to think, “Even though there might be factors, like a critical boss or spouse, difficult customers, or product problems that may impact my emotions, feeling more persuasive is largely within my control.”
To fine-tune what feeling persuasive is, I’d want to describe what that means to me in specific, sensory terms. To do this, I ask myself, “What will I see, hear, or feel when I am feeling and being more persuasive? Or what might other people notice if I were feeling persuasive?” In response, I might say, “When I’m feeling persuasive, I’ll feel like I’m really being helpful, that I’m giving someone what they need to make a good decision. I’ll be breathing comfortably, thinking clearly—easily accessing information and materials I need, and expressing myself in a dynamic, helpful way.”
Because feeling persuasive is a large outcome, I may want to narrow that down. For example, I might want to narrow the focus a little so my goal becomes: “I want to be feeling more persuasive in my job.”
Next, I’d ask myself about the outcome of the outcome (the “Meta-Outcome”) so I can try on what achieving my goal will do for me. What is essential, and often missed, is that in any outcome or goal, you are unlikely to
know how satisfying it really will be until you have actually experienced it. In the case of any large goal, you want to find or create opportunities to sample it before investing what may be years of your life only to be disappointed. For instance, before starting law school, an internship or administrative job in a law office would be a good idea.
To explore my meta-outcomes, I’d ask myself, “What will feeling more persuasive in my job do for me? When I’m thinking clearly, easily accessing information and materials I need, and communicating effectively, what else will that do for me that’s even more important?” When I think about this, I might say, “My customers will respond more positively and give me more orders. If they give me more orders, I’d make more commission. If I make more commission, I could buy a better car. And, if I could buy a better car, I’d feel more comfortable taking those long road trips my spouse loves.” You get the drift—this line of thinking about the “Meta” (next-level) outcomes took me from getting more orders to taking long road trips!
2. HOW WILL YOU KNOW WHEN YOU HAVE IT?
Because I now have refined my goal using the first question and subquestions, I can more easily address this next one, right? This question requires me to create evidence—so I’ll know if I’ve achieved my goal or at least am making progress. Establishing appropriate and timely evidence invites me to consider how soon, or how frequently, I want to have this outcome. As the saying goes, a goal is a dream with a deadline. Absent a commitment to take action, little is ever accomplished.
So when I ask myself, “How soon do I want to feel more persuasive at work?” I may be tempted to answer, “Right away!” A more realistic approach is to identify a time frame that allows me to take the necessary steps to achieve my goal—but doesn’t leave things in a “someday” type of holding pattern. So, I might say, “I’d like to feel more persuasive at work by end of second quarter because I’ll get to present my sales numbers at our June meeting—and my results will reflect my increased feeling of persuasiveness.” This gives me a specific target date. To establish additional evidence, I could determine benchmarks for my current orders and sales dollars.