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SALES MAGNET

Neuro-
Linguistic
Programming
(NLP) – The
Opening
Chapter
1
 NLP stands for Neuro-
Linguistic
Programming.

But what does that

really mean?
Have you ever tried to communicate with
someone who didn’t speak your language, and
they couldn’t understand you? The classic
example of this is when someone goes out to a
restaurant in a Foreign country and they think
they ordered soup, but when the food shows
up, it turns out they actually asked for stew.

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Maps of the
world

So it turns out we don’t so much live in the real world as we create a map, of that world
and we live in that reality. And that reality is your own subjective experience, which of
course is very different to other people’s.

And that’s why you can have two people at the same event who each have quite
different experiences of it, because the interpretation, the meanings, are all constructed
internally and we’re not usually aware of that process.

NLP helps you work with understanding how you have created your own internal reality,
and then gives you tools for transformation.

But NLP is not just the study of subjective experience, because it came from some of
the world’s leading psychotherapists.

It is skills-based and that’s what makes it practical and useful and worth learning. You can
make changes in your own experience that enormously change your experience of reality,
and your ability to build on strengths and make changes when you spot your own
weaknesses. So, it gives a road to, if you like, continuous and never-ending improvement.

“ NLP helps youwork with

understanding how you have created
your own internal reality, and then
gives you tools for transformation. ”

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 Who is NLP for?

I think it’s people that are above average when it comes to the personal
development area of life. They’re motivated. They want to do better. They want
better results. They want an improved quality of life. These are the people that
take the skills and really fly with them.

You can get beyond your own limits and beliefs, and you can learn skills from
anybody that has skills that you don’t. You can achieve things that would have
seemed impossible or very, very hard before NLP.

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So, what are the
typical things that
I would learn if I
was doing NLP?
Usually you start with some of the entry level skills, so you’re building awareness of
how you think about your goals in life and finding which bits work and which don’t.
That alone is quite a powerful tool.

Usually people start getting the bigger shifts when they map that onto some kind of a life
plan and they start looking at how they’re thinking about the changes they’re after in
different areas of life. Most people pre- NLP will have some ways of thinking that are less
than helpful. You just trip yourself up without even knowing you’re doing it.

A lot of people try to make themselves do stuff that they don’t want to do. Then you’re
pushing against yourself. It doesn’t really work very well. So one of the ways of thinking
about things you want to achieve is to make sure that your unconscious mind, as it were
— that’s the bit that you’re not aware of — is actually on side and doesn’t have a bunch of
objections that are going to trip you up.

For most people that’s a big step — to realise it’s not just the conscious mind, but their
unconscious mind is sitting in the background. Because it is feeding into the conscious
mind, it’s kind of running the show. It’s not completely — because your conscious mind
can choose — but that’s still a step beyond how most people think.

And one of the things you find with people that are particularly good at something is
they have this knack of harnessing the conscious mind
and the unconscious mind so they’re both working to their strengths on whatever the
self-chosen project is.

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 3 essential skills

When you boil it all down to the essence, there are I suppose three fundamental
skills in becoming more effective in any area of life:

1. You need to know what you want

2. You need to notice the results you’re getting, not just from the world but also inside
of yourself, and
3. You need to be able to keep changing what you’re doing, not just external
behaviour but also how you think

If you can keep changing those things you will gradually become more effective at getting
the results that you want. That would be the ‘overview model’. And that’s a systemic
model; it’s a system, the feedback loops. And it works and it’s really powerful.

“ If you can keep changing those things you

will gradually become more effective at
getting the results that you want. ”

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The NLP
Communications
Model

In the mid-1970s, the discovery that there was a structure to our subjective experience
was a major breakthrough. And the way the mind works is
like its own complex system. You look at the structures and you find that the beliefs you
hold — and often the ones you’re not even aware of — are the ones that limit you or
create or de-create areas of possibility. So
there’s a whole major area in working with your own beliefs so that they’re supporting you
rather than stopping you.

Then there’s the emotional states that you bring to bear in any situation. These make a
huge difference to your level of effectiveness. I mean, think of the difference between
feeling anxious before giving a talk or feeling really confident and looking forward to it.
One is going to lead to a much better talk than the other.

In this diagram you can see how an external event, X, goes through a process of Meta
Program filters, with things that are deleted, distorted, or generalised before then
becoming Internal Representations. When you combine this with the State of Mind
and a person's Physiology, you get
a person’s response. And guess what? If you shift those factors, you can dramatically
alter your responses and results.

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A look at beliefs

If we each live in a self-created, subjective reality, a lot of the shape of that reality is
determined by the beliefs we have about ourselves, about other people, about how the
world is and how the world works. So, our maps — our understanding of the world — are
really built of beliefs. And when you look at the different types of beliefs we have, it’s
often useful to think of them at different levels.

There is a simple expectation belief — “I expect this meeting will go well”, or “I expect it
will be tough”. Now, the self-fulfilling prophecy effect means that whatever you expect
to happen you increase the chance of it happening by a small but significant extent just
by that expectation.
So that is a lower level belief. At a level above that, you’re going to have beliefs about
what you can or can’t do, or are or aren’t good at. Those are ‘capability beliefs’. And they
also tend to self-fulfil to a small but significant extent.

When you look beyond capabilities and ask, “Well, what is it that drives us
— why do we develop some capabilities and not others?”, there is another level of beliefs
about what we consider to be important in the world. We attach significance to things.
And those you could call our values — what is important to us in life.

“ So, our maps —our understanding of

the world —are really built of beliefs. ”

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 A look at beliefs

When you look beyond values, you find a higher level belief of identity, which is our
notion of who we are, our map of our will. That identity, like all the other levels, tends to
have self-fulfilling prophecies attached to it.

Then you look beyond those beliefs about who we are and ask what’s bigger than that.
And because we tend to seek meaning, we often have beliefs about meaning, about
purpose, about what we’re here for, about what matters in life. Those beliefs that are
about things that are bigger than ourselves are sometimes referred to as the ‘spiritual
domain’, sometimes not. But nevertheless, they’re important to us and they’re key
drivers of behaviour.

So those would be the five main levels or different types of beliefs that we all have. And
by becoming more aware of them and making shifts in some of them, that alone can
make a significant difference.

“ Those beliefs that are about thingsthat

are bigger than ourselves are sometimes
referred to as the ‘spiritual domain’,
sometimes not. ”

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Deletion,
distortion and
generalisations
There are three main categories in the metamodel and there are a lot of sub-categories
within that. But any map will distort reality, because it is trying to simplify it. It will make
generalisations that are not valid, again to try and simplify it and make it useable. And it
will delete all the bits that aren’t relevant, so it’s also full of holes.

So, language has these characteristics. Any sentence will have things deleted or missing
in it. Things distorted, changed into things they're not, and unwarranted generalisations,
either implied or said. You kind of can’t talk without those things being there. And that’s
not bad. A lot of the time they work and they work fine. But when they don’t work, we
trip up on them and that is where the metamodel skills are really useful to go in and find
out what you’re likely to trip up on before you do.

The metamodel is probably the most powerful, single tool for analysing or unpacking or
working with language. Language itself is a map, a model of reality. As you can see,
words are never the real thing. They’re just maps of the real thing. Now, when you create
a whole reality made up of words
— which is what we do and we live in that verbal reality — there are lots of kinds of
snakes and ladders in the world of words. We can trip up on language very easily
indeed.

The metamodel is just a great way of ensuring we don’t trip up in language and — when
other people are being unclear about stuff — ensuring that the questions to ask to find
out what they actually mean come to mind very readily. They become automatic, in fact,
after you’ve got used to them. So where precision communication matters, and this may
be in anything from one-to-one coaching through to setting up a business deal, the
metamodel is the tool par excellence to make sure you not only don’t slip up on language
but can get language as clean as it’s possible to be.

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 Deletion,
distortion and
generalisations
An example is Lord Raglan, who you might remember from history lessons
as being responsible for the disastrous Charge of the Light Brigade during
the Crimean War. Raglan’s actual message to his cavalry brigade was, “Lord
Raglan wishes the cavalry to advance rapidly to the front”.

Now, that message was vague, because there were three different fronts
on the go during the battle in question. And although the officer carrying
the message died — so we’ll never know where the misunderstanding
arose
— it seems he wasn’t clear on which front the brigade were supposed to
advance to. He doesn’t seem to have asked for clarification. As a result of
this and other misunderstandings, the Light Bridage ended up charging the
wrong enemy position — against Raglan’s intentions — and almost half of
them were killed, wounded or captured. If the messenger had been able to
say, “Which front specifically?” the whole disaster could have been
averted.

Now, that’s a military example where a lot of lives were lost. In the
business world, those kinds of mis-communications happen quite
commonly. It could be, for example, “Can you take the next week to
prepare the report?” The simple question: “Which report specifically?”
would stop you wasting a week on the wrong report.

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How to influence
people using NLP

We influence people all the time, whether we know it or not!

Influence is when you look at “You do not exist on your own in the world; other
people are doing the same as you”. So you’ve got a kind of feedback loop
where whatever you say or do has an influence on somebody else, and by
changing what you do you can find out how to be more effective
in how you influence other people. But it’s a process of experimentation. It’s
not a magic cure. It’s just being aware that some things will work better than
others. You can rapidly learn the most effective ways to influence or be around
other people.

Let’s use an example of how one person can influence another.

A classic, simple example of how one person can influence another is that
some people are much more visual in the way they think than others, who
might be more auditory. If you were presenting something to a single person it
would be quite important to know their preferred way of thinking and then
change the way you set out your proposal so that it is more visual or it is more
auditory in order to get through to them.

Here’s another example. People are often completely unaware of the effect of
body language. Simply by noticing somebody else’s preferred body language
style and copying it to some extent, you can build rapport with that person.
They’ll feel more comfortable with you and if you’re making some kind of a
proposal for a project, they’re going to be much more receptive to it.

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 Artfully vague
language

This came from studying one of the world’s finest hypnotherapists who had spent a lifetime fine-
tuning the artfully vague use of language. His particular forte was being able to use words in a
way that connected, not just with the conscious mind, but also at a deeper, more unconscious or
intuitive level. And he would read minute body language cues as he was saying these artfully
vague words. Using those techniques he was able to achieve quite remarkable effects with
people, and I suppose it’s one of the finest examples of precise and yet vague communication.

So, artfully vague communication is very powerful in a culture which values verbal ability and
verbal fluency to be able to talk in that way. What makes it super-powerful is if you can deliver, at
the same time as reading the
non-verbals you’re getting from the audience, you can make the course corrections literally as
you go through each sentence. This is a huge advantage if you're interested in
communication, influence, sales or any similar areas.

An example of this from master NLP Master Trainer John Seymour is this:

“I’ve been training all day, I’d driven three hours to get there and the kettle was broken in the
room, and I just wanted a cup of tea. And I went down to the guy and said, ‘Can I have another
kettle?’ He said, ‘Oh no, the maintenance staff are off now. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow.’

“And I thought very quickly and I found myself saying, ‘I understand that, and thanks for letting
me know, but I was just wondering whether you probably know, er, which is the closest room that
has a kettle in it, being unused. Er, if you were to get that for me, I could swap it over and I'd be
happy, and you might be pleased I've got my cup of tea.’ I didn't go that far because, actually, he
just started doing it.”

As you can see, by learning NLP skills you can become an exceptional communicator —
something that is incredibly valuable as a life and business skill.

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 Your next steps:

NLP is one of the most potent sets of skills we’ve got in terms of human experience.
However, there is no quality control in the field whatsoever. So it’s really important to find
either books or teachers that are the best you can get because the worst you can get
will just put you off for life.

That said, there’s a limit to what you can really learn just from reading a book. You actually
need to apply the skills, and usually that means either a coach or a teacher and courses.
Then you need to take charge of your own development and start practising specific skills
so you’re building your competencies across a range of areas. If you do all of that, then
you can get the full benefits of NLP.

Join one of my seminars to see how you

can know more about influencing , rapport building
and succeed at work and in personal life using NLP.

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 About:
AVINASH DESHPANDE

20+ years of overall experience as a Executive

Leadership & Wellness Coach, Award-Winning
Strategist and organizational transformation &
communication specialist. Currently working as
the Head of Corporate Strategy and Business
Improvement with the Government of Qatar.

In addition , Avinash has the following credentials

Award Winning Strategist (World HRD Congress)|
Certified Executive Leadership & Strategy Coach | ICF Accredited
Speaker | Presenter |Business Transformations| ISACA Certified
Strategy Consultant | Robert-Kaplan Certified BSC Practitioner
Trainer - NLP & BSC Practitioner |ABNLP-USA & NLP-UK Certified
Certified Wellness Coach| IAPCCT ( Life Coaching and Personal
Transformations)

Click here to watch my 40 minute

webinar on Introduction to NLP Planner
Program on you tube for further details.

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