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.

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.)

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.

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…

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.

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.

Individuals people who spy on the intimate private lives of others are called Peeping Toms. They are usually socially ostracised and are frequently prosecuted, unless…

… unless they do it en masse. Because if lots of others are doing it then it’s OK. As when one in five of the population watches TV series like Big Brother to see who will seduce and get into bed with who!

Then being a Peeping Tom is acceptable because it’s a new national past-time. And because the people you’re watching are exhibitionists. But it’s still being a Peeping Tom…

(This was the gist of another chat I had over the holiday period, by the way. And, though I’m not sure why, my views weren’t universally accepted   )

I was chatting with some friends recently and we got talking about what might be the most useful bit of NLP for improving our relationships with others.

For me it had to be Perceptual Positions (or Different Perspectives as we call it in Pegasus NLP).

Why? Because the NLP Perceptual Positions method gives us a way of systematically considering an interaction from at least three viewpoints: our own, that of the other person, and the viewpoint of a detached onlooker.

Most of us are a pretty good, experts in fact, at looking at the situation from our own perspective. And the reassuring thing about doing this is that it usually confirms how right we are…

But if we then take a moment to step into the shoes of the other person and consider it from their perspective, and “as if” we were them, that certainty tends to get challenged somewhat. We recognize that, just maybe, there might be other ways of looking at the situation.

Which is probably why so many of us do it so infrequently!

Today is Remembrance Sunday which commemorates the official ending of World War I - when, on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month Germany signed the armistice with the Allies. It’s the day when we remember those who died in all wars.

Out in the New Forest today we were on the final day of the NLP Core Skills programme and we agreed to take a break at about 10:55 a.m. to allow people to recognize the moment in whichever way they considered was appropriate for them.

I spent a few minutes walking almost ankle-deep in autumn leaves among the trees and listening to the birds. Somewhere in the distance was the sound of a volley of gunfire to mark 11 a.m. and, curiously, just at that moment a huge hawk swooped down almost to ground level about 50 yards in front of where I was standing… Right at that moment a dove might have been more appropriate, perhaps, but it was a wonderful moment.

We have a saying in NLP that “if you always do what you’ve always done you always get what you’ve always got.” (It’s not exclusive to NLP, I know, but it’s one of the ways in which we encourage ourselves to become more adventurous and more flexible in how we deal with situations.)

And, as I walked back to the training room, I tried to imagine how the world would be if political leaders had to prove their worth rather than their wealth and cunning before they were allowed to have power. And if, as part of proving their worth, they had to study the 15,000+ major wars in the last 5000 years of world history to recognize the futility of war - especially ones which are designed to change people’s beliefs.

Yes, I agree, it was just a fantasy… but it might make a difference - there’s a saying: ‘those who aren’t prepared to learn from history are destined to repeat it.’