Pegasus NLP Blog
NLP for people who like to think for themselves!
Motivating people their way
Here at Pegasus NLP we have developed an approach to motivating people called Consultative Motivating. It uses a number of elements of which two are fundamental:
- Motivate people their way: use their motivational style rather than yours – and discover this by chatting with them
- Motivate through consulting rather than lecturing. Remember old sales maxim ‘when you’re telling you’re not selling’.
The rest of this article includes last week’s series of 5 Twitter Tips on motivating people. These are in italics. (The Twitter Tips series is published on @pegasusnlp daily. Each week has a theme and this is followed by a blog article during the following week which develops that theme.) Continue reading
Customer service in a day-care centre
In response to the previous article on the Pegasus NLP Blog about good customer service paying dividends Karen from Demark asked if the same idea of excellent customer service applies with, in her case, people attending a public day-care institution.
Who pays for it?
I believe that whatever we do for a living, or as a vocation, we have customers – i.e. people who come to us for service or for products. To me, it’s irrelevant whether we are providing a tangible product or an intangible service such as care or information.
And it’s irrelevant whether they are paying us directly or whether we are getting paid by somebody else to provide them with the service. Continue reading
Can I have a replacement part, please
Just over a month ago I contacted the manufacturers of my cycle roof rack to say that a part had broken when I was putting the roof rack on a different vehicle. “That’s fine – could you let me have your address?” I did and was then told that a new part would be with me in the morning. And it was.
I fitted the part to my Mont Blanc cycle roof rack carrier and it worked fine once again. They are great cycle carriers and have the added advantage that, because of their nice deep slot for the front wheel, they hold the bike upright while you are attaching the supports as you put it on the roof. This makes the job very much easier.
I already knew this before I contact them. And would happily have paid for the damaged part. The fact that they didn’t ask for money, that they had a “no problem” approach to my call, and that the part was dispatched immediately merely confirmed my belief that I had bought a great product from Mont Blanc. Continue reading
Last week’s Twitter Tips
The new series of Twitter Tips began last week. The total tips for the last series, which began in February 2011, was 100 and this year we’re aiming for about twice that. The tips are posted on @pegasusnlp Monday to Friday. And each week’s 5 is followed by a blog article expanding on them which will be posted early in the following week.
Last week’s theme was “Dealing with Difficult People” so let’s look at the 5 Tips.
Labelling people
(1) Difficult People. ‘Difficult People’ categorises them & blinds us to their individuality and their complexity. Use Person with a Difficulty instead.
The labels we attach to people, in this case as “difficult”, determine our attitude towards them. So if I label somebody as difficult or awkward or unfriendly I will approach them expecting this behaviour – whether or not I receive it. And my approaching them in this way will, in turn, actually evoke the response in them that I had prepared for.
The label determines of their very personality is “difficult”. Changing the label to “person with a difficulty” change the focus from their personality to the difficulty they are having and, therefore, towards looking for solutions. Continue reading
Taps, floods, and anger
One of the analogies that I invented years ago and use extensively to explain unwelcome or ‘negative’ emotions is The Bathroom Tap.
Let’s say that you share your house with a friend, friends, or family. After your day’s work you arrive home, open the front door and discover water running down the stairs and into the hallway. The hallway is already flooded with a few inches/centimetres of water.
What do you do?
Do you rush into the kitchen, find a bucket and a mop and start furiously mopping up the hallway? That’s pretty unlikely. Because the water is still running down the stairs – because somebody has left a bathroom tap running upstairs! Continue reading
But is anger a habit?
Looking at the visitor statistics for this blog, I noticed that this year’s most visited blog article so far is ‘How we do the Anger Habit.’ In the 8 months since it was published it has been viewed just under 1800 times.
This is great and yet what I find particularly interesting is that nobody has commented on, questioned or challenged the article’s central idea – that anger is a ‘habit’ i.e. it is something that we do rather than something which happens to us.
‘It’s not may fault – that’s how I am’!
I first began introducing the idea that our emotions are really ‘habits’ in the weekly stress management courses which I began running in the mid 80’s. These were held in Dorset, in the south of the UK, and proved very popular – so much that, at one stage, I could be running four, five or even six courses per week throughout the area. Continue reading
I don’t like wasting time
People who are consistently late for appointments or meetings tends to share a particular trait. They don’t like waiting around – it’s a waste of time.
In their eyes arriving 5 or 10 minutes early for an appointment wastes valuable time that could be spent on other things. So they will cram in more activities and leave setting off until the very last minute.
In their eyes that’s being efficient.
Buffer zone
In some of our NLP courses we ‘model’ or identify what’s behind how people do things. Whenever we do this on the subject of comparing the latecomers versus the ‘on time’ people one key trait surfaces: the ‘on time’ people give themselves leeway.
In planning to arrive at 2:15 PM meeting Kerry, who likes to be on time, will estimate the journey time and then some extra time as a ‘buffer zone’ to allow for contingencies such as meeting somebody on the way, being delayed at traffic lights, the train being late, and so on. Continue reading
The current Pegasus NLP Newsletter is about incessant talkers – the people who talk at us – and talk and talk and talk.
Really skilled Incessant Talkers don’t just bore us, they actually affect our mood and our effectiveness – by scrambling our thinking.
I had an experience of this not so long ago whilst driving with an incessant talker as a passenger. As I began negotiating a tricky traffic situation I recognised that I couldn’t concentrate because their flow of verbage was preventing me from assessing how to handle things. Fortunately I recognised this in time and asked them to stop talking until I had got into the traffic flow. This they did – and immediately resumed their flow and continued for the rest of the journey.
Once I had recognised their style – and when to stop them from talking – it became a fascinating experience.For example:
- They seemed to have no interest in whether or not I was interested in what they were saying.
- They seemed to have no awareness of my need to pay additional attention to my driving at certain points.
- Not once was I given a moment to consider what they had said – their ideas followed one another back to back, without so much as a second’s pause.
- If I forced my way in I was allowed to comment on things, briefly – but my comments didn’t seem to have been heard.
- Not once was my opinion asked for.
- Their flow of chatter and topics never stopped.
From an NLP standpoint it was quite an amazing feat. And, as I listened, I tried to figure out, or model, what must be happening inside them to be able to function like that. (And, yes, I did ‘try’ to figure it out – without a lot of success).
The newsletter is the result of my subsequent thinking. It offers a few ideas on what makes them tick – and some insight into how their talking may be affecting their listeners…
Strong leaders?
Since we began using outdoor activities in our trainings in the 90s which has repeatedly occurred in team development sessions: the tendency for a new team to produce one or more ‘strong leaders’ – and for this to result in the rest of the team becoming ‘weak followers’ or in their emotionally opting out of the activity. (It was from observing this dynamic that our ‘Strong leaders create weak followers’ theme began.)
Team dynamics in action
The ‘Low Ropes’ session is a great team development experiment which we introduce on the first afternoon of every NLP Core Skills course. It’s an opportunity to experience, from the inside, how a team forms, develops and pulls together and what gets in the way of this.
On the Low Ropes you are part of a group of 5-8 people who have to negotiate a series of non-strenuous team challenge and problem-solving activities, and, ideally, become a team in the process. To do this you have to pull together because the activities are designed so that one person cannot do them alone. Continue reading
Petty People in the workplace
The current Pegasus NLP Newsletter is about people who are nasty, spitful and gossipy. Who rule others through fear. Who cause dissention and undermine morale in organisations. And who play on the fact that the majority pf people want to be nice! Whereas they want to play ‘enemies and allies’.
We look at some of the different types of Petty People behaviours – and at their impact – and at what to do about them.
Spreading unhappiness
The article was inspired by conversations I’ve recently had with two people who are experiencing difficulty as a result of Petty People making life difficult in their respective workplaces.
And, when you consider that we can spend 1 in 5 waking hours at work – and even more time thinking about our jobs and travelling to and from them – having this environment contaminated by Petty People isn’t a trivial issue. Continue reading
The Self Consciousness ‘Habit’(*)
Last week’s newsletter and blog article on Self Consciousness produced quite a few e-mails, including one from Bob (not his real name) who is in his mid-30’s, has had the self consciousness habit all of his life and finds that it’s getting in the way of his finding a life partner. He said he found the simplicity of last week’s explanation of self-consciousness enlightening and is now actively putting the tips into practice – and wondered what else he could do.
The answer?
The answer, in a nutshell, is: relax, stop trying, be yourself and others will find you more interesting and attractive.
See, that was simple, wasn’t it.
Not only that but as a strategy it works for many people. And yet… as always with advice, there are important missing pieces; pieces which distinguish between platitudes and useful directions!
For example:
- The advice isn’t tailored to Bob’s personal circumstances (although there’s nothing we can do about this short of moving onto personal coaching mode)
- There is no rationale for why this advice might be useful (that’s addressed to some extent below)
- The advice lacks specific and practical ‘how to’ steps which Bob could choose to follow (that’s also addressed below).
This was to illustrate how so much advice, and so many positive thinking books, fail their audience i.e. they don’t deal with points 2 and 3. On the other hand the precision of NLP enables us to define step-by-step methods for doing things such as ‘be yourself’.
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