Pegasus NLP Blog

… 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…