Pegasus NLP Blog

I’ve just been to the annual NLP Conference in London. The conference has been running for about 20 years but this was my first visit after about 14 or more years and what a delightful and encouraging experience!

After being an ‘NLP conference groupie’ since almost the very first one, I’d given up attending in the early 90s because it had become boring and I’d really grown tired of the types who were frequenting it. I’d had enough conversations with, and attended enough workshops presented by, boring, lifeless, and intellectual types who knew a hell of a lot about NLP but didn’t seem to demonstrate any of it: people who’d look over your shoulder or off into the distance as they talked with (at?) you about their latest NLP book or product or theory.

And yes, among the 400 or so people at the NLP Conference this weekend, there were a few of those types, too. As, for example the ‘well-known NLP author’ who came in for the last 30 minutes of my three-hour session and, while everyone else in the room had their eyes closed while actively participating in the closing visualisation exercise, was carefully writing down everything I said… But, happily, people like that were far outnumbered.

It’s great – and encouraging. Things have changed dramatically and for the better. Based on my experience in the early 90s I decided to only attend the Saturday of this year’s weekend Conference, and that only because I was presenting a workshop on that day. But I now wish I’d attended the full weekend.

What a great bunch of people to be with! Alive, alert, communicating enthusiastically with each other, interested in and learning from one another, really walking the talk of NLP.

The 80-90 people who attended my session on ‘how to use NLP to have great relationships’ were truly a joy to work with: enthusiastic, sophisticated, fun loving, ready to ‘give it a go’, thoughtful and discerning, challenging in the positive sense of the word, etc. I certainly learned a lot from them and I hope they got a few ideas from my session, too.

It’s great to think that, in an age when more and more of the NLP training providers are becoming more mercenary (packing more and more hundreds of people into shorter and shorter ‘certification’ trainings), that there are still people who are ‘getting the message’ that NLP isn’t about gathering techniques to seduce, or to persuade, or ‘kick ass’ - but is about having a fulfilling life and great relationships.

The next NLP Annual Conference is on 13-15 November 2009 and, first thing tomorrow morning,  I’ll be checking in my diary to see if I can free up that weekend!

This Toxic Relationship Game is about status. The expert player has a range of tools for putting you in your place (which is in a lower status to them) and all are based on knocking you down and then building up again in a way which makes you feel appreciative of their friendship and support!

This game is both crafty and complicated:

Step 1: First they make a disguised criticism of you. This is designed to undermine you in some way but they claim the criticism is not their view but that of someone else. Crafty, this, since it means you cannot defend yourself or retaliate.

Step 2: Next they comfort you and offer their support to help you deal with this unfair criticism. They are positioning themselves as your only trustworthy friend.

Step 3: In doing this they have created a relationship based on the old highly-questionable sales tactic of ‘Hurt & Rescue’ – first they hurt you and then they rescue you. So they have established a status in the relationship: they are the strong comforter and you are the weak victim who needs them!

Incidentally, the Now, don’t get me wrong… intro is just one of many ways in which they can introduce their disguised criticism. Other intros include:

• People have remarked…
• It’s been said that you…
• I tried to fight your corner but they wouldn’t have it, and they said that you …
• You must be very upset when people say that you’re…
• I don’t know where they got the idea but Jack and Jill have been saying that you…

This is quite a subtle or sneaky game. They will criticise you in order to put you down - but they will claim the criticism is somebody else’s viewpoint. And then they will comfort you or in some way help you get over or deal with the pain of hearing about the negative comments made by those nasty people!

So their way of making, and retaining, friends is to first make you feel bad and then build you up again but in a way which makes you sort of grateful for their comfort and moral support…

Now that is subtle.

(Those of you who have completed the NLP Practitioner Training will recognize, of course, that they are using a version of the NLP Meta Model pattern called Lost Performative or, as we call it in Pegasus NLP, Sneaky Judgements.)

People who run the ‘Tell me I’m wonderful’ pattern or programme are looking for fans rather than friends. They regale you with tales of their exploits and successes and deals. And they are very insistent that you listen to and appreciate every little detail - and that you demonstrate how much you admire them!

You are their audience and they require that you demonstrate your appreciation of their wonderfulness.

Like emotional suction pumps their personal insecurity is so great that they constantly need to be admired, praised, and be the centre of attention.

For these people it’s all about reassurance – and there’s never going to be enough of this. What’s more they rarely give praise or complements or, if they do, this will be grudging and less-than-sincere.

Maintaining a long-term relationship requires a pretty robust sense of self esteem – and endurance. And trying to change them or convince them they need to do something about their pattern is unlikely to succeed since to accept help or guidance would mean accepting they’re not perceived as being as wonderful as they wish to appear…

I’ve been gathering together some ideas for a mini workshop I’m running at this year’s annual NLP Conference which is being held this coming weekend in London.

No, this doesn’t account for my long silence on this blog. That was due to a particularly busy training period – plus the almost-writer’s-block phenomenon whereby the longer you put off getting back into writing the more reasons you find to continue putting it off…

Anyway, the theme of the mini workshop is how NLP can help in developing and maintaining great relationships. So I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about relationships and have been wondering about the less-than-useful games people play in relationships.

This is in the spirit of that great little 1964 book by Eric Berne “Games People Play’ - still insightful, fresh and well worth reading 44 years on.

So far I’ve come up with quite a few ‘Toxic Relationship Games’ including

1. Tell me I’m wonderful
2. I’m better than you
3. You’re living your life the wrong way!
4. I’m an NLP-expert – I can read your mind
5. Now, don’t get me wrong…
6. Isn’t life awful!
7. Let me sympathise with you!
8. Hurry up and finish speaking…
9. Conversation Hijackers

The first of the Toxic Relationship Games will be posted shortly!

There’s a lot of rubble to get rid of so I ordered a skip from the local company. We’d used them many times before but this time they couldn’t negotiate the narrow corner because their new lorry was higher and wider and a huge branch was in the way. The Arboriculture Officer from the local council gave permission for the branch to be removed as long as it was done by a tree surgeon.

I’ve never had to contact a tree surgeon before but a quick scan on the Internet, Yellow Pages, and the local newspaper this afternoon showed that there were many such people available. I contacted a friend who recommended one and he is coming along tomorrow morning.

Now the interesting thing was that I then went down town and in the space of about 20 minutes saw no fewer than three vehicles with “tree surgeon” signs on them!

More than I’ve probably noticed in the past year…

And I’m probably destined to be seeing tree surgeon vehicles for the next few weeks - now that I’m tuned into this topic!

It’s the same pattern of mentally filtering to tune in to certain things that we use to get angry - when we begin paying attention to and totting up all the little things which irritate us about our partner, family, friends, colleagues, acquaintances etc. Totting them up to the point where we get well and truly angry - and then the least little thing can produce an explosive response.

It’s the same pattern which operates when we’re in the first heady flush of love and go around noticing how wonderful life is and how nice people and how beautiful is the sky and so on.

Or have a bout of poor health and begin noticing how much illness and pain and disease there is all around us.

Or begin househunting and notice “to let” or “for sale” all over the place.

Usually we set these filters, or in NLP-speak “meta-programmes”, automatically or unconsciously - they just seem to happen - and they carry on, in the background creating or emphasising our moods. And sometimes they happen when we allow the media to set the filters for us - as for example when we go along with whatever is the current flavour-of-the-week for the mass media.

Here is the UK a recent hot topic for the media was The World Economic Recession which was/is going to ruin us all. The it changed to The Knife Crime Epidemic which was/is making our streets unsafe for everyone. Right now, and for a few more days, it’s untypically a good-news topic i.e. the UK Gold Success at the Olympics.

So what? Well, for me, it’s a matter of noticing what I’m paying attention to and how this is influencing my attitude – of noticing whether I’m gathering evidence to feel good or to feel bad! And changing this filtering process if it’s not taking my mood/attitude in the direction that I’d like.

Oh, and remaining aware that journalists have a living to make and deadlines to meet and that bad news is good business for them.

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…