Practical EQ

Emotional Intelligence and "The Apprentice"

Here in the UK that compulsively watchable show "The Apprentice" has returned to our TV screens - and making an equally welcome return is my good friend Gavin Ingham's commentary on it: The Sales Apprentice. While Gavin is drawing lessons from each show specifically from a sales angle, many of the points he makes about the first show are actually about the emotional intelligence of the candidates. I've added my off-the-top-of-my-head thoughts about emotional intelligence in 'The Apprentice' as a comment on Gavin's blog.

Double-Loop Learning

More about Chris Argyris and Donald Schon's ideas - following on from the "Espoused Theory and Theory-in-Use" posting.

Our actions can be viewed as keeping some set of variables within acceptable limits. These variables are determined by our theory in use. When something goes wrong, we tend to look for another strategy that will keep the variables within those same limits, rather than questioning the variables themselves. We can describe this as 'single-loop learning'.

The more profound "double-loop learning" happens when we examine the variables themselves (or the values, beliefs and assumptions behind them) in the light of the results of our action strategies. We then become more aware of our theories in use.

Where only single-loop learning is taking place, the unexamined assumptions behind it tend to lead to advocacy of one's own viewpoint, defensiveness, a win-lose outlook, and a wish to control interactions . This can happen at personal, team or organisational levels.

Double-loop learning, by contrast, is characterised by inquiry rather than advocacy, greater openness, a win-win outlook, and a willingness to share control. This creates a more positive emotional climate and enables individual and organisational development.

Methods of facilitating double-loop learning include reflection, coaching, and receiving feedback which compares espoused beliefs and explanations with actual results.

Further reading: Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness
by Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schön

© Andy Smith and Coaching Leaders Ltd 2008

"Espoused Theory" and "Theory In Use"

How do we explain the discrepancies we observe in other people between what they say they believe, and how they act?

The theorists Chris Argyris and Donald Schön suggest that people have 'mental maps' of how to plan, implement and review their actions in given situations. It is these tacit, unexamined maps - a set of unconsciously held beliefs, assumptions and rules - which guide their actions, rather than the explanations that they give to themselves and others to make sense of what they do.

Argyris and Schön described the mental maps implicit in people's actions as "theories in use", and their consciously held beliefs and explanations about their actions as "espoused theories".

Argyris suggests that bringing theory-in-use and espoused theory into line with each other will increase effectiveness. So how do we do this? "Double-Loop Learning" - which is discussed in my next entry.

Further reading: Theory in Practice: Increasing Professional Effectiveness
by Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schön

Confabulation: "Why did I do that? Hang on while I make something up"

It seems that we are not as much in control of our selves and our decisions as our subjective experience would suggest. In fact, most of our decisions are made unconsciously by the "elephant" of our unconscious processing (in Jonathan Haidt's useful metaphor from his brilliant book The Happiness Hypothesis) for while the main job of the "rider" of conscious awareness, who thinks and feels as if he is in control, is actually to make up justifications of the elephant's behaviour after the event. These explanations may bear no relation to the actual reasons driving the unconscious processing.

This process, called 'confabulation', was first noticed in the 1880s when Russian psychiatrist Sergei Korsakoff observed some of his patients making up often impossible stories to cover gaps in their memories caused by previous alcohol abuse. It has also been noticed in people with brain damage and some stroke patients as they concoct elaborate alternative explanations for the effects of their impaired brain function.

You might think that confabulation happens only when the functioning of the brain has been in some way disrupted. However, research suggests that confabulation is something we all do, a lot of the time, because we don't usually have access to the real (unconscious) reasons why we do things.

For example, Nisbett and Wilson's classic experiment in 1977 asked people which of four garments laid out from left to right they preferred. 40% of people preferred the rightmost garment - as expected, since people will tend to choose the rightmost item in a series, other things being equal. When asked why they chose that one, the subjects talked about the quality of the weave and the vividness of the colour. But the items were identical! (Nisbett, R.E. and Wilson, T.D. (1977). "Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes". Psychological Review, Vol 84 pp 231-259.)

What's more, if we change our minds about something, we tend to forget that our original opinion is different - as in Goethals and Reckman's 1973  experiment (Psyblog: Our Secret Attitude Changes).

Helen Phillips' illuminating article Mind fiction: Why your brain tells tall tales (New Scientist 07 October 2006) quotes more confabulation studies.

So what are the implications of these findings? They add support to the NLP idea that "why?" is an unproductive question in therapy or coaching; not only are the responses likely to be excuses and justifications, but they probably won't even be an accurate representation of the person's real beliefs and  decision-making processes.

Also, they suggest that asking "why?" in usability tests will be a waste of time. The same might apply in other types of research like focus groups as well.

What can you do to increase your self-awareness by becoming more aware of when you are confabulating? Reflect, meditate, get other people to explore your reasons through pertinent questioning (as can happen in coaching or an action learning set), practise self-hypnosis (with the intention of listening to your unconscious mind as well as merely giving it suggestions) or keep a learning log or a journal - if the evidence of the beliefs you used to hold is there in black and white, it will be available to your conscious mind to learn from.

It's worth doing more to get to know yourself. The great hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used to say that the reason people had problems was because they were out of rapport with their unconscious minds.

Attending to the elephant

More elephant/rider related stuff - Maile McCarthy on her Breath by Breath blog (from where I've lifted her illustration) suggests attention as a way of bringing the conscious rider and the unconscious elephant into greater harmony:

noticing when your conscious and unconscious thoughts are pulling in opposite directions

As Fritz Perls said, "attention is itself curative".

Meanwhile, the Australian NLP trainer Chris Collingwood (in a separate conversation on nlpconnections.com) tells me that he prefers the description of 'conscious attention and unconscious processes' rather than conscious and unconscious minds - following John Grinder in this I think.

You are the elephant, you are the rider

How is it that you can want to stop smoking but still continue to smoke? Or want to eat healthily, but still give in to the temptation of junk food? Or resolve to be a better person, but still find yourself getting irritable?

Much has been written down the ages about how puny will power is when compared to our habits and desires, especially over an extended period of time. Sooner or later, our attention strays or our resolve weakens, and old habits reassert themselves.

The best metaphor I have seen for this mismatch between conscious intentions and unconscious behaviour comes from Jonathan Haidt's excellent and very readable book The Happiness Hypothesis: Putting Ancient Wisdom to the Test of Modern Science. He likens these two aspects of our selves to an elephant and its rider. The rider represents the 'controlled' processes of the mind, the planning and reasoning that takes place one step at a time in conscious awareness, while the elephant represents the hundreds of automatic operations we carry out every second outside of conscious awareness.

The elephant has been around a lot longer than the rider. It includes emotions, gut feelings, and visceral responses, and, like Pavlov's dog, responds to stimulus control, whether the stimulus-response pairings are innate (like the startle response) or learned (like the urge to answer the phone when it rings).

The rider, by contrast, has very little influence on behaviour. Although he can look into the future, imagine hypothetical scenarios, and make plans, he cannot order the elephant to do anything. Essentially, the rider is an adviser. Usually, though, we don't realise this: we think either that we are in charge of the elephant, or  (perhaps more often) don't realise there is an elephant, and then are baffled or give ourselves a hard time when we don't stick to our resolutions and don't carry out the actions that we know we "should" be doing.

Problems occur when rider and elephant are not operating in harmony. The great hypnotherapist Milton Erickson used to say that the reason his clients had problems was because their conscious and unconscious minds were out of rapport.

In a direct contest between the rider and the elephant, the elephant will win every time. It's a lot bigger and stronger, and, as Haidt points out, our automatic processes have been honed over millions of years of evolution to work pretty much perfectly. The controlled processes, by contrast, are a recent development - 'Rider 1.0' - and still have some bugs to be ironed out.

It is possible, though, for the rider to use his ingenuity to train the elephant in various subtle ways, to distract it from harmful stimuli, and to refocus its attention on more productive goals. Nor should the flow of information be just one way. The elephant is aware of much more of what is going on in the surrounding environment than is the rider, so listening to what the elephant can tell us (in the form of feelings, intuitions, dreams and even physical symptoms) can help us to make much better plans and decisions.

In future articles I'll be exploring the nature of the elephant/rider relationship further, and outlining some practical ways in which our conscious minds (the rider) can both influence and learn from our unconscious minds (the elephant).

Haidt's book is about much more than this, by the way. Despite being easy to read, it's so rich in information, useful perspectives and research information that I expect I'll be integrating some of its implications and thinking about the many ways in which they can be useful for some time to come. Highly recommended!

Read more about the book: US | UK

Another blog posting mentioning the elephant/rider idea:

Leadership by and for rider/elephants by Dave Shearon on Positive Psychology News Daily

If you would like to learn some ways of communicating with and influencing your elephant, you might want to check out my courses in Manchester, UK this spring:

NLP Foundation Skills 21-24 February

NLP Practitioner Training (18 days in total, starts 21 February)

Self-Hypnosis Made Easy 26 April

Identifying and clearing limiting beliefs

My all time favourite method for clearing limiting beliefs is Time Line Therapy, or one of the now numerous descendants and variants of it (like the one we teach on our NLP Practitioner training). However, before a limiting belief can be cleared, the client has to recognise it as a limiting belief (unless it clears as a side effect of an intervention aimed at something else, which can happen).

Which opens the question of how do we identify limiting beliefs, and also how we define them.

For me a limiting belief is one that the client recognises as limiting - the client, rather than the coach, decides what's limiting. The issue is of course complicated because it may be that the client is not initially aware that some of their beliefs are holding them back - it's part of the coach's role to help them realise that.

How do we assist the client in identifying them? After all, if the client was aware of their limiting beliefs to start with, they probably wouldn't believe them any more.

One way can be the NLP 'meta model' (which has some overlap with CBT/REBT questions around how rational beliefs are). The meta model identifies generalisations, 'shoulds/musts' and so on and provides questions to help the client reconnect their belief system to their sensory experience (or 'reality' as most people would think of it).

Another very powerful method is the Option Process or Option Method, as outlined in Barry Neil Kaufman's book 'To Love Is To Be Happy With' (which Michael Neill recommended to me ages ago and I highly recommend) but also described out there on the web. This uses some simple questions to help uncover beliefs which the client may not be conscious of (probably formed ages ago and not thought about for years) which often don't survive the light of attention.

Limiting beliefs can also be overcome by having enough experiences which contradict them - as when someone becomes more confident by taking up martial arts, or just by spending time in the company of people with a more empowering belief system. I highly recommend Steve Andreas' book 'Transform Your Self: Becoming Who You Want To Be' as a guide to how people form their concept of themselves and how to change it.

Making better decisions with NLP (8) - Notice how you make decisions

Compare your ‘strategies’ for reaching a good decision with how you arrived at a bad one. There will probably be significant differences. Much of your processing may be unconscious so you will get better results working with a skilled NLP practitioner.

Check what kind of mental images you are using in your decision-making process. NLP therapist Andrew T Austin suggests (in this video, about 10 minutes in) still pictures lead to bad decisions, moving pictures to better ones (because it’s easier to see the consequences of the decision).

Remedy: If your mental pictures are largely still, try making them into movies.

Making better decisions with NLP (7) - Turn off mental chatter

Meditate or use peripheral vision to still your mind before making important decisions. When you clear some space, what is really important to you has a chance to emerge. For guidance on how to use peripheral vision, visit www.practicaleq.com/peripheral.html.

Making better decisions with NLP (6) - Learn from mistakes

If one of your decisions turns out bad, review how you went through deciding. Notice any obvious flaws. If things don’t turn out the way you want, ask yourself “What do I need to learn from this?”