Practical EQ

Making better decisions with NLP (1) - Situation or Consequence-based

Actually this is only NLP if you follow the definition that "anything that works is NLP", but it's certainly NLP-compatible.

People usually base decisions on either the situation they face, or the consequences of their decision. Situation-based decisions are reactive (“at effect”) and lead to excessive concern with being ‘right’. Consequence-based decisions are “at cause” and allow for more creativity and more focus on good questions – not every idea has to be ‘right’ as it can take you towards a better idea.

How to tell a situation-based decision: if you ask a person why they took a decision, they answer with a description of the situation – usually either a justification (or excuse) or showing a need to be “right”.

How to tell a consequence-based decision: they answer by talking about desired consequences with no need to defend their decision.

(model adapted from Consequence vs. Situation by Harris Kern and Ken Moskovitz – an article on the excellent Harris Kern web site www.harriskern.com)

Upscale Your Influence - in a way that works for you

There are many tips and tricks for influencing others – a good source is Robert Cialdini’s classic book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Rather than try to learn all of them at once you may prefer to use a simpler way to discover what works uniquely for you, because there’s a lot to remember and you may not be comfortable using some of the sneakier tricks.

(The sneakier tricks are still worth knowing about though, because you will be able to recognise when someone is trying to use them on you!)

Here’s the method:

1. Make sure you are absolutely believe in your message
If you are not 100% congruent about what you are saying, change it until you are!. Make your vision as clear and vivid as you can.

2. How successful are you currently at influencing?
Rate your success level on a scale of 1-10, where 1 is the least successful you have ever been and 10 is how you will be when you are at the level of successful influencing that you want to reach. This is not an objective scale – your “2” might be someone else’s “8” or vice versa.

3. Acknowledge what’s already working
Notice how you got to the number (“n”) you’ve reached, and how you stop yourself slipping back to n minus one. This is what’s working already in your approach. What would happen if you did more of it?

4. What would be different at n+1?
How would you notice if you were just one step closer to being a great influencer? What conditions would be in place? What would you be doing differently? Don’t worry at this point about how you will get there.

5. What will you do to get there?
This is about doing more of what works, or just trying out some of the many influence tips out there. You could try them out in ‘safe’ situations like shops, and even push your comfort zone a little. When something works, do more of it: when something doesn’t turn out how you wanted or expected, ask yourself “What do I need to learn from this?”

Note: Imagine how you could also use this method to improve your performance in any area...

NLP/EQ Tip: Solution Focus (2) - Scaling

Note - this tip follows on from Solution Focus - How To Use The 'Miracle Question'

Think about something you want to achieve, or even some (minor) problem that you are currently facing. How would you rate where you are in relation to this issue on a scale of 0-10 - where 0 is the worst it's ever been, and 10 is how it's going to be when it's exactly how you want it?

This seemingly simple question does a number of useful things and opens the door to even more. Let's have a look in more detail at how it works:

• Unless the rating is zero, it helps you realise that not everything is bad in the current situation. When we focus on solving a problem, that tends to expand to fill our awareness until all we see is the problem. Rating the problem on a scale helps us to realise that some things are already working, and some components of the solution are already happening.

• Having a scale implies that it's possible to move. If we view the current situation as 'the problem', and contrast that with our ideal solution, it can seem like there's no bridge between the two - particularly if we are prone to black and white, either/or thinking. The scale builds a bridge between 'problem' and solution - and obviously implies that we can move along it to get closer to the solution.

• Do you ever give yourself a hard time about not achieving enough? As you know, that will most likely demotivate you. Instead, you can use scaling to remind you of what you have already achieved with this supplementary question:

(given that you are at n on the scale now) How have you got there from n-1? 

Or: How do you stop yourself sliding back to n-1?

Notice how these questions acknowledge and validate what you have already been doing to make the solution happen, and provide behavioural reinforcement to your unconscious mind, encouraging it to do more in that direction.

• You can use scaling to begin to move towards your ideal solution, like this:

(given that you are at n on the scale now) What will be different when you are at n+1?

Notice that the question is not asking 'How are you going to get there?' - just 'What will be different?'. This begins to build an image in your mind of how things will be when they are just a bit closer to how you want them, and what you will be doing differently - a form of mental rehearsal which makes it more likely that you will take action.

Of course, if you are using scaling to coach someone else, you can equally well use these questions to assist them in moving towards their solution. You can also ask, for any action that they tell you they are going to take: 'On a scale of 0-10, how committed are you?' For anything they expect to happen: 'On a scale of 0-10, how confident are you that this will happen?'

Normally I give sources for any research that I quote. Here's an additional snippet I recall reading somewhere, but the source escapes me - so it's up to you if you believe it or not: when we assign a numerical rating to a problem, this engages the left hemisphere of the brain, which is associated with more positive emotions. So just by scaling a problem, we may start to feel better about it. If anyone is aware of the research which backs this up, do let me know!

I have learned a lot about scaling from The Solutions Focus: Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE - an excellent book by Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow (US readers order it from Amazon.com here). It's highly readable and practical, and adapts the solution focused approach from its origins in therapy to coaching, management and organisational change. I'm going to do a full review of it soon - watch this blog!

NLP/EQ Tip: How can you mend a broken heart?

(in the words of Al Green)

This posting is adapted from my contribution to a discussion on a life coaching forum - another coach was asking how best to help a client who was having trouble getting over the end of a relationship.

The coach wrote: 'What I am wondering is whether any of you NLP experts out there in 'Coachland' can make any genuine claims at mending broken hearts speedily? Wouldn't it be great if we could wave a magic wand and have those feelings of sadness just fade away?'

As dealing with 'negative' emotions is one of my specialist areas, I couldn't resist responding - and before I knew it my morning had disappeared... So in case any of you are in the same situation, or have clients who are struggling with the weight of emotional baggage, I reproduce it here - slightly edited to remove references specific to the discussion it was part of:

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Left to itself, crippling grief or sadness might fade away as we learn something from it - or it might stick around and reinforce itself, as we interpret everything that happens subsequently through the lens of sadness. As the neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux says in his book 'The Emotional Brain', 'strong emotions make us stupid'.

Assuming we do deepen our understanding, the learning process can be slow and painful, and not leave us much time or energy for anything else.

So what to do? There are various powerful interventions available, from NLP and elsewhere. Some of them do have downsides and are only appropriate in certain situations. I believe we can summarise the various methods that therapists have devised to try to deal with sadness under five headings:

1. Live through it and try to understand it

2. Let it out

3. Distance yourself from it

4. 'Zap' it

5. Scramble it

6. Learn what needs to be learned, at the unconscious level

Looking at these in more detail:

1. Live through it and try to understand it

This is the traditional 'stoic' route - 'time is nature's healer' and so on. When we add in talking about the events and feelings in an attempt to understand them and gain insight, we have the basis of the psychodynamic approach.

Sometimes this might work - we have a moment of insight and we come to terms with the feelings, allowing the emotional charge to fade away. There are various potential downsides though; it's hard for the therapist to know what has led to the breakthrough, or when, if ever, the breakthrough will come.

Also, _by its nature_, the process is long and hard. Talking about events that we feel sad about naturally tends to make us feel sad. The stronger the emotion is, the harder it is to put the events into perspective, as the functioning of the cerebral cortex (the part of the brain that is able to reframe things, make sense of them and put them into perspective) is impaired by the emotion and we revert to more primitive limbic processes. When we are hurting badly, we can't think straight.

Even if we do gain an intellectual understanding, that doesn't necessarily help us much. It's possible to understand all the reasons why_ we feel cripplingly sad - but at the same time still feel cripplingly sad. If the understanding remains at the conscious level, it won't touch emotional patterns at the unconscious level.

Plus, unless the therapist, counsellor or coach is skilful, the client can end up with more reasons and justifications for feeling sad, leaving them even more disempowered.

2. Let it out

'Have a good cry', the idea being that the emotion has built up like lava under a volcano and needs to be released. Another application of this idea would be 'hitting a pillow' for anger management (there's a very funny parody of this idea in the movie 'Analyze This': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3ek0j5JKRQ).

This is the now discredited 'hydraulic theory of emotion', stemming from Descartes' idea that emotion is like a fluid that travels along the nerves. It's similar to 'catharsis' (in Freud's sense of the word, which apparently is quite different to how the ancient Greeks used it).

Sometimes catharsis might work - but for more serious sadness, all we are doing when we are weeping and wailing is training ourselves to weep and wail more. All we are doing when we hit a pillow is training ourselves to hit something when we feel angry.

Whether you repress an emotion or repress it, it may still be there. In fact, modern research suggests that bad memories tend to fade if we don't think about them - a process known as 'extinction'.

I haven't turned up a good reference on the web for this, but Dylan Evan's excellent little book 'Emotion: The Science of Sentiment' contains a masterly demolition of the hydraulic theory.

3. Distance yourself from it.

The idea here is that the sadness is a response to images you make in your mind, as you imagine or remember people or events. If you picture the image as smaller, further away, less colourful, or dimmer, the emotion will diminish.

This is one part of the NLP technique known as the 'phobia cure' or 'rewind technique', and it's extremely effective for distancing yourself from unpleasant feelings. The downside would be that if there is something to learn from these past events, if you distance yourself too far you're not going to learn it. Also, if your mind starts applying distance in the way you approach everything, you're going to lose the valuable information that emotions can give you - for example, you might be less aware of how other people are feeling, or just not care about it.

Some people who (perhaps unconsciously) have distanced themselves too far in an effort to avoid painful issues can come across as arrogant, ruthless or insensitive.

Distancing yourself is useful to take the level of emotion down to a level where deeper work becomes possible. It's not a solution in itself, although for 'first-order' problems (where there's no secondary gain and no deeper message to be learned) it may be sufficient.

4. 'Zap' it.

This can be done with the NLP technique known as 'collapsing anchors'. If you invoke the sadness _at the same time_ as an incompatible feeling or combination of feelings (such as joy, excitement, humour) which is even stronger, the weaker feeling will be extinguished as if it is 'blown out' of the nervous system. Once gone, that's it - it won't usually come back, although Joseph LeDoux suggests that a 'ghost' of it remains which could be reactivated under extreme stress.

This process takes place at the level of the nervous system - there's no understanding involved. So the client would miss out on the opportunity to learn whatever there was to learn from the emotion. Again, this would be fine for first-order problems but isn't advisable for anything deeper.

5. Scramble it.

This (I believe) is the basis of energy and meridian-based therapies such as TFT and EFT, and also EMDR and the 'rewind' component of the NLP phobia cure. When it works, it's very quick and effective at getting rid of the emotion.

I haven't looked into most of the meridian therapies, although when I did the Thought Field Therapy intro training I found that the explanations of why it worked - perturbations in the energy field and so on - didn't really do it for me. So I'm not sure whether the client gets any deeper understanding or learning (in addition to getting rid of the emotion) or not. I suspect not, although perhaps someone who has trained more deeply in these therapies can enlighten me.

6. Learn what needs to be learned at the unconscious level, the learning of which allows you to let go of the emotion.

This is the principle behind Time Line Therapy and its variants, which I have found to be the most effective and gentlest way of helping someone to let go of the emotional baggage of sadness and other 'negative' emotions.

The process works by temporarily allowing the conscious mind to dissociate from painful memories while the unconscious mind does the work of reframing and putting them in perspective. To the extent that there is a negative emotional charge to any issue or memory, that's telling us that there is still something to learn from it. When we learn what we need to learn at the unconscious level, the emotion can disappear and the events become just another memory. This is like the poet Machado's 'golden bees making honey of our past failures' (from 'Last Night As I Was Sleeping') - but much more quickly, because the 'bees' can work without the emotional baggage weighing them down.

When done properly, with empathy and rapport and paying attention to the client, this process is the one I would choose for helping someone to get over sadness (I would always clear anger first). It allows the client to get the learnings from what has happened to them as well as letting go of the emotion. It's not quite as rapid as 'waving a wand', but you can definitely do something worthwhile in a single session.

I must confess in the version I teach to my NLP Practitioner students I have tweaked Tad James' original very prescriptive wording to the 'official' version of Time Line Therapy™ to make it more user-friendly.

The result of the process, when done properly, is not to take away the ability to feel sad, because sadness, like other 'negative' emotions, should be a warning sign that something in our life needs attention. It just means that we respond appropriately to current events, rather than to the baggage of unresolved events in the past that current events remind us of.

In contrast to the views held by some therapists and coaches, I don't believe that pain is our true nature, or that we all have a 'dark side' that we are in denial about. This just intuitively feels wrong to me. Rather, our natural state, or at least the one we can aspire to evolve towards, is calmness and joy. I can't claim to have direct experience of this all the time, but (I believe) it's our essential self and our birthright.

© Andy Smith and Coaching Leaders 2007

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If you would like to learn effective ways to clear and learn from 'negative' emotional baggage subtly and with integrity (plus how to get some distance from negative _and_ how to 'zap' it, since both these methods have their place) , consider taking a good NLP Practitioner training - like ours at http://www.practicaleq.com/practitioner.html

NLP/EQ tip: Solution Focus - how to use the "Miracle Question"

NLP/EQ Tip #15: Solution Focus - how to use the "Miracle Question"

Here's a mildly unpleasant thought experiment. Sorry to do this to you, but it is going somewhere and it does get better, honest.

Imagine meeting one of your friends for lunch, and they spend a whole hour telling you about everything that's wrong with their life - in great detail. How would you feel at the end of that hour? Drained, miserable, bored, discouraged? Well, if you would feel like that just from spending that time listening to someone's problems, imagine how much more miserable the friend would be after talking about nothing but their problems for an hour.

Now instead, imagine that your friend is telling you all about how things are going to be when they have solved their problems, and how they want things to be. How are you going to feel after an hour of that? Inspired, enthused, happy for them, uplifted? Well if you feel that way, imagine how much better your friend is going to feel - since it's their life they are talking about. ------

Our habitual impulse when we have a problem is to spend time thinking about that problem to find ways of trying to solve it. The downside of focusing on our problems is that we get more involved in them the more we think about them. A problem can seem to expand until it takes up all of our attention and there's no room to think about anything else.

And of course the more we think about a problem, the worse we tend to feel. In NLP terms we would say that we get into an 'unresourceful state', where it's harder to find the skills and abilities that come easily to us when we are having a good day.

With simple problems it's often glaringly obvious what we need to do to fix them. So we fix them, and move on. Maybe it's so quick and easy to fix that we don't even register it as a problem. But many problems are more complex. So how can we engage with those and still stay resourceful enough to give ourselves the best chance of finding a way out?

The answer is simple. Once you're aware of the problem, stop trying to fix it. Instead, turn your attention to what it will be like when the problem is solved. What do you want instead of the problem?

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Focusing on the solution (without worrying for the moment about how you are going to get there) does a number of things. Immediately you start to feel better, because what you're thinking about is pleasant rather than unpleasant. This makes it easier to access your inner resources.

Also, the more fully you imagine the solution and the more detail you go into, the more you are making the connections in your brain that you will need to actually make the solution happen. This will improve your performance, as sports psychology has shown. The vast majority of successful athletes use mental rehearsal, and studies repeatedly show that mental rehearsal enhances performance (see for example http://tinyurl.com/2zwavb).

Most importantly, if you want to find a solution, the best place to look for it is anywhere but in the problem. Once you know where you want to get to, you can start finding your way there. Once you have the idea of your solution, you can start making it real.

Solution-focused therapy, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg at the Brief Family Therapy Center, Milwaukee, is based on these principles. The beauty of solution focus is that it's simple to use. Although it originated as a therapy method, it can be used in coaching, in solving business problems, and you can use it to help yourself. As a method, it fits very nicely with NLP as it shares a number of assumptions.

Berg and de Shazer developed a number of simple and elegant methods to help us turn away from habitual problem focus towards solutions. I'll introduce a couple more in future newsletters - this time let's look at one of the most powerful problem-solving methods there is: the 'Miracle Question'.

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Exercise: The Miracle Question

If you have some problem in mind, ask yourself this question: Let's imagine that while you're asleep tonight a miracle happens and the problem is completely solved. You don't realise this, of course, because you're still asleep - so when you wake up what will be the first thing that tells you that this miracle has happened? What else will tell you?

Give yourself some time to answer this (especially if your first answer is "I don't know" - just asking the question will get your mind moving in the right direction both consciously and unconsciously. Write down everything that you think of. You are beginning to build the solution (or solutions) in your mind.

NLP buffs will notice that being asked this question shifts the listener from a "problem frame" to an "outcome frame". Framing your thoughts like this is important because it influences the way you think about things, making it much more likely that your imagination will produce something that will help you.

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A couple of supplementary questions you can ask: 1. Who else would notice that this miracle has happened? What would tell them?

This question encourages you to step outside of yourself and think about what would be different in your observable behaviour if the problem were solved. Once you're aware of this, it's a very short step to beginning to act differently.

2. Does anyone else have to change in order for this miracle to happen?

Out of dozens of clients I've asked this question, everyone has said 'no'. Of course, having just described your answer to the miracle question makes it a lot easier to realise that you are able to make the changes you need in your life.

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Given a goal to focus on, your unconscious mind will surprise you by noticing opportunities and coming up with creative ways to get there. So why not try out the miracle question, either by yourself by writing your answers or by getting a friend to ask you the questions. And do email me to let me know how you get on.

In a future posting we'll look at another powerful tool from Solution Focus -  "Scaling Questions".

Note: The thought experiment at the beginning of this article is adapted from the start of 'Words Were Originally Magic' by Steve de Shazer. It's a great book; it does get a little bogged down in a discussion of post-structuralist philosophy but soon recovers when he gets into describing the model, applications and therapy transcripts. You can order it from Amazon here: http://tinyurl.com/24ga8w

Further note: while researching this article I discovered from the Brief Family Therapy Center web site that Insoo Kim Berg passed away on January 10th 2007. I hadn't registered this because I was on holiday for most of January. Both Insoo and Steve (d. 2005) made an enormous contribution to development of psychotherapy. On the site you can find some DVDs and downloadable articles about solution focused therapy.

Seth Godin on changing minds

In a posting on his ever-excellent weblog (I changed my mind yesterday) Seth Godin talks about how hard it is to change people's minds if they are in a situation or a mindset in which there are barriers against change.

If you're aiming to get someone to change their mind, you could save yourself a lot of effort by asking yourself: Is this person in a situation (emotional, professional, even architecturally) where they are pre-disposed to flip?

And

How can I get them to make a tiny flip? And then another one?

A very valuable article IMHO for anyone involved in sales, culture change, or just running meetings.

Coaching Insider magazine

Coaching Insider is a free e-magazine which is a refreshing antidote to the relentless fluffiness of much of the coaching industry (at least in the UK). Highly recommended.

The Incongruent Client

One of the students on my current NLP practitioner training called me today with a problem that every coach will recognise. She is doing some 'practice' coaching for a friend, by telephone. Each week the client very positively identifies and commits to their actions for the coming week - and by the following week, there is always some reason why the client hasn't carried them out.

Pretty much every coach alive has been there. But what to do?

A bit more background: this client talks very positively but is prone to taking too much on, and rarely says 'no' to requests to do even more. The coach had helped her elicit her values around work, and they were all very 'towards'.

My thoughts were that if the client has a pattern of 'people pleasing', she might also be saying what she thinks the coach wants to hear. She probably means it at the time, but deep down, her unconscious mind doesn't want to do it, so when she gets off the phone, she forgets, or something 'outside her control' just (apparently) happens to prevent her.

A few ideas suggest themselves:

1. Gently bring the gap between what she says and what she does to the client's attention: "You say you want to do this, and nothing has happened since you said it. What is going on here?"

2. Check for 'hidden' or unconscious values beyond those already elicited using a 'threshold' process, which goes like this:

a.    “All these values being present, is there anything that could happen that could make you leave?”
b.    “All these values being present, plus  (Value(s) just mentioned)  what would have to happen such that would make you stay?”
c.    “All these values being present, plus  (Value(s) just mentioned)  what would have to happen such that would make you leave?”
d.    Continue with steps b-c until you get repeat words.

This will flush out hidden 'away-from' values that the client may not have been consciously aware of, but which nevertheless have been influencing her behaviour.

Fortunately, these are easy and natural questions to ask someone, as the area under discussion is Work and Career.

3. The client's default setting when someone asks her to do something extra is to say 'yes' automatically - only later considering whether she actually has time for this additional task. What if she got into the habit of saying 'no' automatically?

I got this idea from Mark Forster's excellent book Get Everything Done and Still Have Time to Play - or maybe from this article on his web site.

4. Maybe the goals are just too big and daunting, and the client needs to break them down into smaller steps and only promise to carry out the very first step - whatever she can commit 100% to. In NLP we would call this 'chunking down' and be alert to any signs of incongruence in the client's voice (remember, the coaching is happening over the phone).

Alternatively, Mark Forster calls it the "I'll just get the file out technique".