NLP Training, Techniques & Products for learning NLP

There is no doubt that NLP as a general term has become way more popular in recent years. And there is a good chance that in everyday social conversation that someone there has heard of NLP. However I've yet to hear someone at a dinner party or social function go "Yea I've heard of NLP, that's that really powerful change and influence technology that top communicators and conversational change agents use!". In fact the most common pattern of thought I've heard goes along the lines of:

"NLP - yea I've heard of it … isn't that the stuff that is used to manipulate people" or "you know NLP eh?, how do I know you haven't spent the past hour trying to manipulate me?" or "I once had a boss who was really good at getting what he wanted, and he used to tell people he was using NLP on us all the time. I never could trust him".

Chances are you have had similar experiences. The mass perception (in my experience) that most people have of NLP is that it is some form of manipulation, con, a tool or thing to do to others, or worse is dangerous. Even many people trained in NLP have shared with me that they don't feel good using it "because it is manipulative and bad and I don't want to manipulate people". This kind of thinking reminds me of a story I often heard Richard Bandler tell how in the early days of hypnosis, Doctors weren't allowed practice hypnosis because "hypnosis was dangerous and didn't exist".

Certainly with the popularity of Derren Brown shows in the UK, stage hypnotism around the globe, the occasional story of 'rogue hypnotists'  mind controlling others, and the rapid rise in popularity of NLP techniques being employed in the speed seduction community, that for many the main perception of NLP is it is manipulative.

But anytime I hear something think that way, I am reminded of another thing Dr. Bandler once said .. "NLP doesn't exist!".

You see there is no living THING called NLP. NLP is made up of people who for the most part simply take and apply the techniques and patterns of NLP in some context. There is a small few who are are actively developing the field, but for the most part, most of us use the output of the various models developed and do not "refill the well" as John Grinder has rightly said.

So how could some-thing that doesn't exist be manipulative? I don't think NLP is manipulative .. that's somewhat like saying a match is a killer. A match can help start a fire to keep you warm, dry our wet clothes or it can be used to burn a house down. But to get the first spark going a match needs to be struck, which requires an action, a someone to initiate some thing and that requires a person. So perhaps a better question is .. are some people manipulative?

Well that doesn't need a scientist to say .. yes!. Some people would fall into the category of manipulative (depending on who is doing the measuring and how it is being measured).

Interestingly, the root of the word manipulate dates back to the 1830's when it meant "to handle skillfully by hand", then later, in the mid 20th century it became known as a euphemism for "masturbation." Are we seeing a connection here and how some people think or use the technology? Perhaps…

More recently the common meaning held is "to influence or control shrewdly or deviously", something which many do not regard as necessarily good. Who likes the idea of "being manipulated?".

Yet, NLP isn't manipulative, or is it? What do you think?

I remember Steven Covey once saying something to the effect that he thought NLP was a truly powerful technology however his only bone of contention with it was it was amoral. It didn't dictate any moral way of using it. While we have the core presuppositions of NLP there isn't an overt 'law' or 'rules' for how anyone who learns the technology is required to use it. That said, most trainers I've meet put a strong emphasis in their training, on using it for "good". But not everyone's intentions are designed that way.

Is NLP manipulative? .. it all depends on how you look at it.

Feel free to leave your opinion or comments in the box below.

The Internet is an awesome resource, but if you think of it as millions of ongoing conversations, happening all at the same time, then it is easy for ‘Chinese whispers’ and misinformation to spread around.

Take for example the other day I was on Yahoo Answers and came across two articles talking about body language and read the following statements:

Tyra:

"Whenever a man messes with his belt buckle he wants to have sex and whenever someone you have sexual tension with bite their lower lip they wanna kiss you"

Or Tueur: "This is how to detect someone lie." followed by some commentary about using traditional eye accessing ques information.

or

RM: "when a person talks fast, it means they have a confidence issue"

Do you think these are ‘true’?

To be fair, even highly trained NLPers will talk about someone being a "visual person" or he is a totally "kinesthetic person" etc, an not be aware of the generalization they are making.

In most cases, where we have ‘X behaviour only and must mean that’ kind of statement we have nothing more than a form of projection going on, which becomes a filter we now sort all future similar actions through.

Test it for yourself.

If you are someone who speaks fast, did you know that you MUST suffer from a confidence issue?, or that you MUST be nervous?

Why? Because so and so says so and it must be real because it is on the Internet.

Gentleman, did you know that ALL women think you want to have sex when you touch your belt buckle. Best be VERY careful around the office, especially when you pop out from the bathroom …

Ladies did you know that anytime a man looks up and to the right he MUST be lying. Or that if he uses words like see, clear, quick he is ONLY a visual person.

Of course, I've been deliberately amplifying the implications proposed by each of the above worldviews. Making such broad generalizations with no other conditions or contextual information is usually wildly inaccurate. Yet that doesn't stop people from thinking that it is so .. and therefore the inferred conclusion is there can only be ONE meaning to any given expression is unfortunately widespread.

But making statements about body language, without any contextual indicators of substance to support why X must mean Y isn’t so much the problem as the implications of such conclusions. When you think the ONLY conclusion for X behaviour is it means Y, then without realizing you take on that presumed bit of projection/information as a fact and then act as if it were most certainly the case. And that can get you in to all kinds of hot water.

A girl smiles at a boy in the office and he thinks, “she MUST like me”. A wife sees that her husband gets a text, which upon opening she notices he smiles, giggles but he won’t show it to her and says it’s a work thing, so she instantly worries he is cheating on her.

A boss asks you into the office for an 8:30AM meeting unexpectedly and you instantly think “I’m going to get fired!” and you then you can’t sleep that night. Mis-reading social ques, body language and other people’s behaviour can land one in all kinds of problems.

But it can be reduced when you understand a couple of key things.

Making It Practical:

If you want to be good with body language, or if you'd like to be able to detect and notice emotions as they are happening, to be able to read state changes easily then the first step is to spend some time taking the wool from ones eyes by asking yourself "how do I know X body gesture means such and such?" … "Am I projecting here?" .. "What else in terms of behavior, if it was present would invalidate my assumption about what I thought was going on?"

Challenge yourself and your worldviews on a regular basis. Sometimes your gut instinct will be right yet other times it will be clouded by misperceptions and specific ways you are filtering the world (most of which without challenging you will be never aware of).

If you ask yourself these three questions you will become far better at staying awake from the cultural mass hypnosis about what specific body language means. You will be much sharper at noticing what is really going and detecting behavioral patterns in others, which can be very useful to a skilled communicator, but that is for another post.

Remember in NLP we hold the perspective that people communicate in multiple channels at once .. so you will have lots of other indicators that indicate state change and what is really going on … such as change in skin colour, voice tone, inflection, body posture etc. Stay alert, challenge your own assumptions and be wary when you see only ONE way of interpreting what is going on, without first challenging your thought processes.

And if your curious to learn more and would like to accelerate your ability to track and notice sensory differences and really get a grip on body language, then check out our new 90 minute training called 'Enhanced Sensory Acuity' here.

Got a question or comment?

Enter it below and when I can I'll answer it.

If the technology of NLP is known for one thing, it is known for being able to create change for people quickly.

And we have many ways of creating change quickly, as indeed several other fields do .. but one of the coolest things about NLP is when your very skilled with it you can do it conversationally. You don't need to stop and tap someone on the head (although that is both fun and can be cool too!), rather you can simply have a conversation and change minds … with only your words …. and the more you do it the more addictive it can become that you naturally find yourself helping others overthrow self-imposed limitations, disabling beliefs and just crazy stuff that is sucking joy and happiness out of their life.

But what is the key to creating change?

Rather than focus on a specific technique lets focus on three behaviours.

These are

- Being Tenacious
- Being Attentive
- Being Adaptable

All three are a must.

If you treat people as "broken" or as a "machine" then in my experience you have already put yourself in a poor position because you are looking for what is "not working" rather than focusing on what is .. and more important how X behavior is the right thing, the only thing that should show up given the unique patterns of thought, feeling and behavior is driving the result you have the client describing.

If you project stuff onto the person you are trying to help without being aware that you are doing it .. you might just be screwing yourself over. For example a client comes to you telling you of fear and you instantly think "technique and phobia removal pattern" you will find many times when it just work … and you will also have hamstrung yourself … because you are most likely MISSING what is exactly going on. Not all fears are phobias and not all behaviors can be changed with canned NLP techniques and box 1, box 2, box 3 NLP patterns. (And for the record this doesn't at all mean that the patterns don't work, rather not all patterns work for everything or everyone)

One of the questions I asked Richard Bandler when I did the MTM interview series was "What are some of the habitual questions you have asked … throughout the years that allowed you to be the genius that you are to have created so many innovative technologies?" to which he replied":

"A big question that I ask all the time is what the f*** is going on? "

And that really is an AWESOME question to ask yourself any time you are trying to help someone.

Richard went on to say "The strongest instinct in human beings is not survival it’s to make things familiar."

So when something happens all of us try to filter what we see through the experience of WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW (if you let it) .. and sometimes that can screw things right up. You label something as X when really it is not. In a social situation perhaps you think that look means he/she is annoyed in you, interested in you .. in a work context you think that the lack of feedback means your going to get fired etc etc .. and soon the habitual mental processes of your mind start spinning in high gear.

The best service you can do for yourself and the people you are trying to assist is first start from a place of not knowing .. of asking yourself "What the f*** is going on?" and then stay in uptime and notice what is present, what does show up. If you want to spot a pattern don't chunk down, chunk upward and out .. and notice what is the thing that is driving this behavior-thought-feeling and identify where exactly is the leverage point that you can tap to create a big change for that person.

Tenacity … is the third thing you will want to have in spades … if something shows up and you have never seen this type of thing before .. or don't have a clue how to create a change .. that's when you should be playful … stick with it and drive forward doing whatever it takes to get to results. And most importantly … if you are one of the people who hear a voice inside your head that claims "I can't do this" … " I don't know how to" .. tell that voice to shut the heck up! Yes, it may be right, yes you might not be able to get the person all the ways to the desired result but the fact is you aren't going to become any more skilled and certainly not going to help the person IF you accept some idle natter inside your head before you start.

Making It Practical:

Information and theories are nice but results are better. So today when you are around friends and family notice as new stuff happens and ask yourself that question "what the f*** is happening?" and notice at a sensory level what you can detect .. what you see, hear and externally feel and then notice the narratives and stories yourself and other put on the stuff that has arisen .. is that really what is going on or is it something yourself or someone else has now projected onto a situation?

When your working with a client or trying to help a friend again, ask yourself "what the f*** is happening?" and look to track the patterns that are present .. that one could point to and then once you have figured out what is really the structure that is driving the so called "problematic" behavior be tenacious, attentive and adaptable as you help transform that behavior.

As always if you have a question or comment feel free to post it below. Also if you are someone who has a negative semantic response to using or saying the work f*** then change it to heck or something that works for you.

To your increasing mastery.

Tom.

While getting good with NLP involves learning many skills, there is one communication skill you must master. It is called "Response Attentiveness" …

Its something that every good story teller, hypnotist, trainer and communicator can do with ease. Can you? Before I get into that, answer me a question, what time is it there where you are?

Response attentiveness means you get a response when you ask for someones attention. The two questions above, and the second being a specific "do something" action are both examples of asking and hopefully getting for your attention. Did you answer "yes" to my first question or go "don't know, you haven't told me yet what response attentiveness is!" and did you check the clock on your computer, watch or phone or find yourself wondering .. "why is Tom asking me this?".

You see when you are asking and getting someone's attention, when you do it intentionally and with a more useful purpose than than the basic example above, you get to effect what a person will experience and feel. And if you want to be a great story teller, change agent, coach or hypnotist then getting and keeping peoples attention and having them follow your suggestion/invitations/instructions is essential.

Think about it ..

Having your listener follow along and DO what you are asking of them is important to doing effective change, coaching, hypnosis and persuasion work. Yet this is something I've noted many NLPers seem to rush through in the process of "applying a technique". There is no point starting your conversation, doing a "deepener", running someone through a fast phobia technique or decision destroyer IF you don't have their attention and if they are not doing what you are asking of them. So if you find you are telling a narrative or giving an instruction but the person is not following along then DON'T proceed and just continue on, STOP, loop back and get their attention. Do whatever you need to, to have them sync up with your request.

Have you ever heard a trainer at start of a talk ask the audience "how many people here are x?" and if they get little response they will rebuke the audience and say "People, this is yes …  (head nodding up and down) .. and this is no (head moving side to side) .. so let's try that again, how many people here are X?", and then the audience responds actively. That is an example of response attentiveness at work.

Many times something which you think "didn't work", was as a result of you not having your listener's attention rather than the NLP technique etc was ineffective. You can do as many fast phobia routines as you want or have someone change the way they look at a specific memory but if they fail to follow along and do what you say as you guide them through it then it can easily appear that it "didn't work."

So what do you do? Simply test and find out if they have been following along ..

Check this out for yourself. Next time you don't get the result you expected for some use of the technology .. test to see if the person you were relating/working with was following along or were you racing several steps beyond where they were? And so they never went through the change/instruction process with you?

Making it Practical:

Theory is nice, but as Yoga Bear said the difference between theory and practice is in theory there is no difference but in practice there is!

So let's take this simple concept and go apply it in the real world.

First, if you don't know if you are able to get and hold people's attention at will then you need to start tracking that. Pay attention next time BEFORE you speak if you have the person's attention. How do you know? Well you can observe a behavioral indicator that tells you "you have my attention". That could be the person is looking directly at you, head slightly forward or tilted to one side etc .. eyebrows elevated etc saying "your turn" or "I'm listening" …

For example I was at a wedding recently and when the groom got up to deliver his speech and 120 people continued to talk over him as if he wasn't there! It was the first time at a wedding I'd ever seen anything like that happen. Here was the groom, giving the "speech of his life" and half the audience were talking right over him!

Afterward he was confused as to how that happened and assumed that "the audience must of been bored of hearing speeches" But the real answer was because he started talking before he got their attention. You have to have people's attention first before you start having them follow a story, do an action etc.

Another speaker got up, who did know how to pick up the audiences attention and before he started talking he non verbally picked up the attention of the audience by simply stopping at the podium, while everyone was still talking, extended his energy out and quickly picked up the attention of the entire room by moving his eyes over each table, until a noisy post wedding dinner room came to a complete silence …. and THEN he began to talk.

If you already good at gathering people's attention then practice holding that attention for 1, 2, 5, 30 minutes and see if how well you can have others engrossed and actively following what you are saying and have them demonstrate via different responses that you have their complete attention. You can do this by asking them a question, pausing mid sentence and have them do a forced mind reading (where they finish your sentence for you) or watch their eye accessing ques as you have them follow you through a story that has them access different sensory systems. Be creative. And have fun.

The more ways you have of gathering someone's attention and then keeping it the more powerful a communicator you will become.

PS: Got a question about NLP, a comment or suggestion about a blog topic, simply leave a comment below and I'll do my best to answer it.

Ever wonder how unconscious installation really happens? Ever wonder why some trainers can create awesome learning experiences that stay with you for years after you have left them?

It comes down to a few key skills…that anyone can learn .. with guidance and solid practice.

Trying to go into what is involved in unconscious installation is to big for one email, but I will share some key distinctions that will help set you in the right direction.

Let's deal with the first of three big obstacles that get in most NLPers way:

Unconscious learning isn't possible Vs. Unconscious Installation is an automatic "program upgrade" that requires me to do nothing

As surprising as this may sound, many folks in NLP I've meet think that unconscious learning doesn't exist or others who think if someone does an "unconscious installation" that they don't have to do anything.

Both are worldviews that hold serious practitioners back. As I've mentioned before there is no empirical evidence to show that we have something called an "unconscious". Rather this is a mental construct and a useful metaphor to describe a set of processes that handle many activities outside of our immediate awareness. As human beings we are constantly absorbing and learning from those around us .. and "unconscious learning" is therefore happening all the time. In fact most of the things you know you never learnt consciously. You can't remember learning the "technique" for walking or "speaking" your native language.

If you have ever spent alot of time around someone who is excellent at something, then you may have found that "parts of his/her skill" rubbed off on you. Without realising it you start asking yourself similar questions or approaching a situation in the same way that did. You didn't learn their behaviours consciously, it just seem to "happen" when you spent time around them.

That said … other people fall into the worldview that "I don't know if I have the said skill, I think I do .. I mean XYZ trainer did an unconscious installation on me".

This is a bit of the empire in new robes approach to learning, or thinking you've learnt something. When a trainer/guru/skilled teacher takes you through a process to "install" a skill in you they will have metaphorically wired you up to be more able to do X activity. However you still need to output the behaviour or put into practice the skill.

If you went inside your mind and I guided you through a process to get the skill of cycling .. you would still need to get on a bike and cycle and get primary feedback to truly active any pre-learning that me or anyone else would have setup.

So what does this mean?

It means we all have to take responsibility for our learning, even if Dr. Bandler did the installation. However in the right hands your learning time for getting these more advanced skills can be dramatically shortened.

And learning how to install strateiges and powerful learning experinces for others is a brillant skillset to have as a highly skilled NLPer. That's why I had Master Trainer Michael Breen spend several hours sharing exactly how to install strategies and get you skilled up to be able do this with greater ease.

If you'd like to learn how to truly install strategies with skill, something that you will have for a lifetime. Then check out the Platinum Audio News Club here.

To your increased mastery,
Tom

PS: Got a question, opionion or idea for a post, simply post a comment below.

Natalie Angier at the New York Times made a good post yesterday about the latest findings in the field of enhanced cognition  called "Abstract Thoughts? The Body Takes Them Literally".

What researcher have recently verified  is that we process information not just with our brains but our entire bodies.

That how we all process Time and Space references has a very real physiological response in the body. And this plays in nicely with what we have known for a long time in NLP … about being able to detect how a person is responding to our communication and how, through the intentional use of conversational sub-modalities, we can affect the way a listener experiences our communication - literally.

I'll do a post on that topic another day, but for now I'd recommend you can check out Natalie's full article here.