Pegasus NLP Blog

I’ve always been struck between the attitude in France or Spain or Italy to serving in cafes, bars, and restaurants compared with that in the UK.

In those countries servers do so with panache and style and a pride in their role and in ‘their’ bar or ‘their’ part of the restaurant. They move about with purpose and dignity. They serve you your drink your meal with theatrical flourishes. They enjoy and take pride in what they do - and it shows. And customers respond to them with respect.

Here in the UK things are quite different - and people who serve in such places don’t seem to enjoy heir work or their role. There are lots of wonderful exceptions, of course, although many of these are from mainland Europe!

Many years ago when I first fled from a career in the accountancy profession in Ireland to the UK one of my first jobs was to spend a year or so as a London Transport bus conductor. (‘Conductors’ collected fares on the buses and got people onto and off the buses in rush hour as quickly as possible.) The money wasn’t very good, the shiftwork hours were awful, and I thoroughly enjoyed the job.

It was my first experience of working directly with the general public and, since I would meet and speak with up to a few hundred people on busy shifts, it was a wonderful opportunity to study people. And it taught me an important lesson: ‘you get back what you put out’.

If I slouched about, was moody, and grunted at rather than spoke with people they treated me disdainfully. If I wore my London Transport uniform a bit more smartly, spoke confidently and cheerfully, and managed ‘my bus’ efficiently people treated me cheerfully and respectfully.

Yes, there were moody and grumpy and plain nasty customers. But I decided that I wouldn’t allow them to manage my mood. So, without having any NLP techniques or even knowing about the Zeigarnik Principle, I quickly learned that focussing on and enjoying communicating with the pleasant customers undermined the impact of the unpleasant ones.

As Paul Brady says in the song ‘the world is what you make it’.

It was on one of our NLP Master Practitioner Certification Courses and we were exploring the NLP process of ‘modelling’ – learning to identify how someone does something. And one of the topics we explored was how participants were able to ‘do’ the skill of insomnia.

(In NLP we consider everything we do, whether we do it voluntarily or involuntarily, as a ‘skill’. If someone has an appealing and desirable skill we might model it to be able to teach it to others and/or learn it for ourselves. If someone has a not-so-desirable skill, such as insomnia, we model it to discover how they can change their behaviour and achieve a better result such as, in this case, a sound night’s sleep.)

One of the things which those who were really skilled at insomnia had in common was their ability to accurately calculate the number of minutes of not sleeping they experienced! They would wake up and immediately check the clock to calculate how much sleep they’d had. And how much sleep they were now missing out on. And this clock-checking would usually continue until exhaustion set in and they fell asleep again.

This was a confirmation rather than a surprise for me - I’ve been teaching people stress management skills for some 25 years and I know that not getting a good might’s sleep is a major source of stress in many people’s lives. They can become quite obsessive about it to the point where they dread going to bed, For them bed has become what in NLP we call a negative anchor. Bed becomes associated not with sleep and warmth and cosiness but with anxiety and anger and sleepless tossing and turning and, yes, clock watching.

One of the single most useful ways of overturning this habit is to put clocks out of sight and out of reach (they can still set the alarm to ensure they awake on time, of course). Yet, so fixated do these people become on checking how many minutes of sleeplessness they experience each night that only a few will actually put those clocks out of reach…

… so the old maxim ‘if you always do what you’ve always done you’ll always get what you’ve always got’ applies.