Pegasus NLP Blog

Looking back I don’t why I did it.  Over mothered? Dropped on my head at birth? It doesn’t really matter, the point is I was prone to the odd tantrum.

It is possible, painful though it is to admit, that I actually enjoyed it; wearing a little hurt on my sleeve as I bravely ‘soldiered’ on.

I guess it’s just about acceptable from a child, from a teenager it’s tolerated for a short time - but from an adult? In fact the definition of an adult should really include emotional maturity as well as physical but I can say that in the former department I was lacking.  And then NLP happened, well as least Pegasus NLP happened.

Today if the ‘wrong’ thing is said to me, as fast as a desire for a sulk emerges; a mirror reflection of my face appears, only with raised eyebrows and unwavering stare.  I find myself laughing at this adult self, even putting my tongue out but eventually stepping inside it and moving on.

Thanks to the team at Pegasus I realise that I don’t have to beat myself up about my personality traits, just recognise them. From this I can either be the guide or the guided but the choice is mine and mine alone. (Matt Swain).

Thanks, Matt for the feedback note and for permission to publish it. (Btw, Matt successfully completed our NLP Practitioner Certification Programme a few years ago.)

One of the things you learn in NLP presentation skills trainings is the value of ‘open loops’ in which a topic is briefly explored and then left hanging while the focus moves on to something else – only to be returned to later.

‘Open loops’ is, in essence, one application of the Zeigarnik Effect which states that unfinished tasks are remembered better that finished ones.

So in a training programme skilful and judicious use of open loops means we can cram a lot more learning into a given amount of time – and achieve better retention of the material. Retention can be increased by as much as 90% in adults according to the Zeigarnik Effect paper which Lithuanian-born Bluma Zeigarnik published in 1927.

The down-side of this phenomenon is that it can be the cause of much stress and emotional unease – something which is explored in the early April issue of the Pegasus NLP Newsletter – because the amount of multi-tasking demanded by our daily lives ensures there are always lots of unfinished issues to prevent us from switching off and enjoying recreation time.

NLP has now been around for about 35 years or so. Among other things, NLP has always sought to improve the quality of interpersonal communication. Except in one area – the teaching of NLP, itself.

Even in the early days would-be NLPers had to wrestle with a wonderfully obscure terminology including such terms as:

• Modal Operators of Necessity (words or phrases which denote a rule or a belief that something is necessary)
• Well-Formedness Conditions for an Outcome (goals which have been well designed)
• Lost Performative (making a value judgement but denying ownership of it e.g. “it has been observed that your timekeeping hasn’t been very good recently” instead of “I don’t think you’re timekeeping has been very good recently”)
• Model of the World (a person’s view of reality or of how things are)

These are just four out of dozens or perhaps hundreds of arcane terms which the ‘in the know’ NLPer can bandy about. I’ve actually heard one well-known Big Name in the word of NLP talking about operationalising the Presuppositions of NLP by which he meant walking the talk of the NLP principles. The same individual talks about the field between people or sometimes the mind field by which he means (I think) the ongoing communication and relationship between them.

Why do we need such gobbledygook? Why do we need to have ordinary terms relabelled?

If I were a somewhat cynical person (which, of course, I’m not) I’d suggest it might be a marketing ploy to get people to attend NLP workshops e.g. the terminology is so complex you’ll have to attend a workshop to be able to understand it.

So, as I’m not a cynical person, I’ll suggest that it’s probably laziness supported by a tendency for some of the NLP Big Names to live in a world apart from the “real world” in which the rest of us live – a world where they are surrounded by admiring groupies hanging on their every word and never daring to challenge them because what they say must be true – after all, they are Big Names (Emperor’s New Clothes).

One mark of an expert is that they can explain things concisely and in simple everyday language. Which is why in our own Pegasus NLP Courses we seek the proficiency of being able to explain NLP concepts to a child of 10!

Yesterday the UK financial market briefly lost confidence on HBOS, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender. And HBOS shares dropped by 17% at one stage.

It’s been a tough time for The Markets recently, according to the media, and they’ve been variously feeling uneasy, running scared, feeling more confident, getting excited, and panicking.

In reality The Market is simply groups of traders in different countries guessing how shares are likely to move and then buying or selling these shares in order to make profit. And it appears that yesterday’s crisis for HBOS was caused by rogues traders spreading unfounded rumours to drive the shares down so they could then profit from the shares price.

The NLP Meta Model enables us to identify from a person’s comments how they are thinking and, properly used, it one of the most powerful and widely applicable NLP models. One of the categories in the NLP Meta Model is called Nominalisations.

A Nominalisation is an activity viewed and described as a thing and following the news is a great way of Nominalisation-spotting!

The Market: a Nominalisation for the activity of financial traders buying and selling shares in order to make profits turned into a thing. Using the Nominalisation deflects our attention from the reality of what is happening.

The Government: the activity of politicians deciding things – or, sometimes, not deciding things. Again the use of the Nominalisation deflects our attention from the personal actions and motivations.

The Times said: this usually occurs in ‘what the papers say’ reviews when we are told what The Times or The Daily Telegraph or The Daily Mail editorials say about today’s hot topic. But The Times doesn’t write or speak. As used here it’s just a Nominalisation which deflects our attention from the fact that these are simply the views of some hard-pressed writer trying to meet a deadline – or, more usually, the views of the individual who owns the newspaper.

Then there are the more every-day Nominalisations

• There’s no communication in this team = we are not talking effectively with one another
• This relationship isn’t working = we are not relating satisfactorily with one another
• Friendship is hard to find = how I have been making friends up to now hasn’t worked
• He has an attitude problem = I don’t like his behaviour
• We need more motivation = we need to motivate ourselves

The list can go on and on - just like this article could - but you’ve likely got the idea … In all cases Nominalisations deflect our attention from what is really going on. And, critically, deflect our attention from possible solutions.

… at least not too quickly. Negative moods are, quite rightly, a target for most positive living approaches, including NLP. After all, remaining in an angry, depressed, or panicky mood isn’t much fun and there are lots of better ways of feeling.

If you’re in a negative mood, and you have a few NLP skills, the temptation is to focus only on getting rid of the mood. Which contravenes a core principle of NLP – the pacing and leading concept which boils down to ‘first get in rapport with where the person is right now – and only then attempt to influence them’.

This principle can apply to self, too. Rather than furiously trying to ‘not’ feel the negative mood how about first getting into rapport with yourself, before you attempt to change the mood?

But why stay in the mood for a second longer than you need to? The label ‘negative mood’ indicates we don’t like the particular state – anxious, tetchy, gloomy or whatever -  so you’d think the best thing is to furiously get rid of it and replace it with a more pleasant state…

This is fine as long as you first do something quite important: discover what produced the negative state in the first place and assess if you need to do something about that. Because if we miss this step the mood will recur, again and again and, we’ll be forever fighting ourselves!

Once again, if we’re not prepared to learn from (our) history we’re destined to repeat it – if you always do what you’ve always done etc.! (By the way this is the topic of this week’s Pegasus NLP Newsletter.)

One of the common myths about NLP is that you can easily tell if someone is lying by watching their eyes.

The belief that you can use the NLP Eye Movement Patterns as a sort of ‘instant lie detector’ is something that comes up in just about every NLP Core Skills workshop that we run. Participants will have read about it on the net, or heard about it from friends or even (heaven help us) been taught it in an NLP workshop.

The myth is based on the belief that, if you ask someone to think about something they’ve experienced, they should:

• Look up to their left if they are genuinely remembering the event
• Look up to their right if they are making up an image i.e. if they are inventing or ‘making up’ a scenario rather than remembering a real event

Sounds good and, yes, this can be the case for some people… (Although, even for these people there will be times when they will not follow this pattern consistently.)

However many people will have their own way of moving their eyes which may be quite different from the traditional NLP hypothesis.

Still other people will appear to do their remembering on the ‘made up’ side. They will usually have a different and less detailed visual memory. (Incidentally, this isn’t just my observation – it was mentioned about 30 years ago by Grinder and Bandler in the book Frogs into Princes - the first easy-to-read NLP book. It’s now a little dated, but is excellent and well worth reading a few times!)

So the ‘NLP Lie Detector’ technique doesn’t work with people who naturally ‘remember’ on the ‘made up’ side. Or who tend to vary the way they move their eyes depending on the situation or context. And it also doesn’t work for people who, rather than looking up to the left or the right, look straight ahead and visualise by defocusing and projecting their images into the space around them.

Lots of people like to over simplify NLP and reduce it to a series of techniques such as the Seduction Technique or the Lie-Detector Technique. For my part, I like to think that NLP can survive this trivialisation. Used with respect for the other person, NLP can be a wonderful aid to communication and to relating with and to engaging with other people.

It’s sad to see NLP being used as a technique, as a way of overpowering people, as a way of manipulating people, as a way of boosting one’s own ego at the expense of other people, etc.

It’s sad for NLP - and it’s sad for the people who are using it in this way.

And, incidentally, for those who consider “lie detecting” to be a serious and worthwhile application of NLP – and who are prepared to invest a reasonable amount of time practising their NLP skills - there are far better ways of identifying truth versus untruth than observing how people move their eyes…

This week’s Pegasus NLP Newsletter discusses how we don’t need an holistic or mind-body NLP because real NLP is holistic – hence the name Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

The Neuro part of the name refers to how NLP explores the the way our neurology and physiology impacts on our daily lives.

The Linguistic bit refers to how NLP explores how both verbal and non-verbal language impacts on our experience.

The Programming bit is about the way in which we use consistent patterns or ‘recipes’ or automatic programmes to do what we do in our everyday lives.

The newsletter also talks about the Triangle of Health – the mental, physical and nutritional ways in which we can support or undermine our mental and physical wellbeing – and how, to be at our best, we need to pay attention to and invest in all three sides rather than just focus on clear thinking or exercise or a good eating regime.

Top of the Pegasus NLP anger poll, in which people can vote on their ‘favourite’ negative anchors has always been “being spoken to in a patronising manner”.

Current score for this is 517 which is way ahead of being tailgated while driving (193), automated telephone switchboards (192). And queue jumping, many people’s pet hate, gets a mere 122.

This illustrates the importance which we attach to being respected. Being spoken to in a patronising manner impacts us at the Identity level of the NLP Neuro-Logical Levels or Personality Map. The other buttons mentioned above simply transgress our standards – our beliefs about how things should be - and so come in at the next level below Identity which is Beliefs & Values.

Incidentally, for those who haven’t come across the Logical Levels, first developed by Robert Dilts, it’s a model with which we can identify what makes people tick. With it we can identify, for example, which level of their personality a person is talking about and therefore how best to respond to them.

From the top down the levels are:

1. Mission and Vision: the big picture for our life, where we’re going with it, who fits into it, etc
2. Identity: our self-image and how we interpret events around us in terms of this
3. Beliefs & Values: includes beliefs about what is possible or impossible, what should or should not happen, and the values or feelings which we want to have more of and less of our lives
4. Capabilities & Skills: how we think, the skills we learn and our innate abilities
5. Behaviours: how we act
6. Environment: how we interact with our surroundings and with other people.

By the way, this is a very brief thumbnail sketch of what is arguably one of the most important and valuable NLP models.

So next time your buttons get pressed - next time you feel wound up or put down - check which of the upper two levels, Identity or Beliefs & Values, is being impacted. It may not reduce the impact of the event but it will give you insight into the intensity of your mood change; Anything which implies that we aren’t being respected as equals will always evoke a very strong reaction.

This week’s Pegasus NLP Newsletter is about negative anchors and how, unless dealt with, they can result in our feeling as if our moods just happen to us - as if we’re on autopilot.

In NLP workshops we examine how negative anchors work e.g. you’re going through your day, feeling fine, and then something happens which for you is a negative anchor and that’s it - instant mood change! So you feel bad for a while and then get yourself back on track.

However the most serious aspect of having lots of unconscious negative anchors is their impact, over time, on our self-esteem. We know we ’shouldn’t’ respond to these triggers. We know we ’should’ be more positive. So we read lots of positive thinking books which make it all sound so easy. And we make endless ‘new starts’ where we’re going to be positive, going to be more in charge of our moods, going to not let things get to us and so on.

But the negative anchors still get to us. Our negative moods continue to happen automatically.

Why? Because traditional ‘positive thinking’ methods simply don’t work with these hot buttons. Negative anchors are pretty well immune to intellectual approaches. It’s as if they bypass the intellect and head straight for the emotions.

But not knowing this can result in our thinking we’re to blame - when it’s really just a matter of not using the right approach…

The Professional Guild of NLP was founded in 1984 and now has around 20 organisational members. It is an independent membership-owned body which stands for a professional standards of training in NLP.

Member organisations agree to a code of ethics, a core syllabus, and to a minimum length of training.

The Professional Guild of NLP was set up to ensure that, in the free-for-all to provide impressive-looking bits of paper called NLP Practitioner Certificates (irrespective of what length of course a person had attended or what standard of training they had experienced or what standard of skill they had attained at the end of their training) the customer would be assured of a quality NLP training experience.

In addition to Organisational Membership the Professional Guild of NLP now offers Individual Membership to people who have trained to at least Certified NLP Practitioner standard through a member organisation. If you’re lucky enough, or discerning enough, to have done this you can apply for Individual Membership here: Professional Guild of NLP.