pegasus nlp blog
practical nlp applications & ideas
Time to sell yourself
Many people attend job interviews or on-job appraisals with a naive belief that if the look good, feel confident, and do a good job of answering questions they’ll succeed.
This approach is naive because to is not taking into account the dynamics operating oin an interview and, especially, it is not looking at the interview from a key viewpoint –that of the interviewer.
The interview is a selling opportunity
In an interview you are in competition with a number of others, unknown to you, so you have to ensure you convince the interviewer that you are the best for the job – and that if the interviewer backs you this will enhance rather than threaten their career.
Self esteem is not a thing – it’s simply a way of thinking
This week’s Pegasus NLP Newsletter is about self esteem. And how, whether it be high or low, self esteem is simply a habit – a habitual way of thinking about ourselves. As American psychologist and philosopher William James observed about 100 years ago ‘All our life … is but a mass of habits’.
Many experts refer to people as having ‘low self esteem’ – as if this were a thing which exists somewhere inside us and which, therefore, needs expert professional treatment.
Yet, as we recognise in NLP, this is missing the point by miles! Because there is no such ‘thing’ as self esteem – whether it be high or low. Self esteem is not something we have - it is something we do through how we think. Continue reading
You’re already a life coach
Tip 1. ‘Pegasus NLP Tip: You’re a coach whenever you help a person with a difficulty: teacher, manager, parent, friend, professional coach’.
The term life coach describes a person whose profession involves helping others overcome their difficulties and achieve their goals. But we all act as amateur life coaches at times.
You are life coaching whenever a friend or colleague or member of your family asks for your help in dealing with a problem. If you are a team leader or manager you do it as part of your role – especially in appraisals. Many parents aim to offer coaching to their children as an alternative to telling them what to do or think.
Last week’s NLP Twitter Tips on @pegasusnlp offered 5 suggestions for doing a better job of ‘amateur life coaching’. The week’s tips are developed in this article. Continue reading
In NLP we act as if we have six main ways of thinking, or ‘representing’ or processing information i.e. our 5 senses plus our ability to think through self talk and analysis. We call these representational systems, or rep systems. Of the six the most commonly used are seeing, hearing, feeling and self talk – since few people use the smell and taste senses as a means of thinking.
(NLP and representational systems was the topic for our Monday to Friday NLP Twitter Tips on @pegasusnlp for the week ending 24 February so the 5 Tips are expanded here.) Continue reading
The Minister speaks
I was looking forward to seeing how the professional speaker would address the audience. He was a UK Government Minister and the keynote speaker at the conference. I was in the audience for the opening session because I would later be presenting a workshop.
My heart sank when he stood up holding his sheaf of notes. Over 45 long and exceedingly boring minutes later he stopped. I had long since given up attempting to follow what, if anything, he was saying. Instead I was studying the various strategies that members of audience were using to stay awake. Fortunately I was over to one side of the room so I had a good view to do this. Unfortunately I was at the opposite side of the room to the doors so couldn’t quietly escape as I noticed a number of people had done. Continue reading
Mention ‘brand’ and most people think about sales and marketing. But ‘brand’ can be a much wider topic if we think about it as being the emotions which people associate with people as well as with products. (Last week’s 5 Twitter Tips on @pegasusnlp were about branding and how this is relevant to your career or your personal business.)
How is your career brand doing?
(1) Pegasus NLP Tip: ‘Your brand’. We each have one. It’s how we want others to feel about us: colleagues, customers, managers, interviewers etc
Think of your own career brand – do people think of you as
- approachable or aloof
- wise or a bit dim
- someone who knows their stuff or someone who is bluffing Continue reading
Rapport – feeling at ease with someone
Rapport is what we experience when we feel at ease with and trust one another. It is the result of our attitudes towards one another.
In NLP we consider rapport to be an essential foundation for good communication because without rapport there may be a lot of talk but there is little genuine exchange of views.
It can be useful to have a variety of ways of facilitating and enhancing this rapport and NLP provides us with lots of these, some of which are manipulative, some are clumsy, and some are elegant and respectful. (By the way, in NLP the word “elegant” is used to describe the most simple and effective way of doing something.)
Last week’s @pegasusnlp Twitter Tips began a new series of tips on Rapport so let’s look at the featured Tips (these are in italics below): 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. Continue reading
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.) 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. 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. Continue reading
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