I met my friend Julia the other day. A bump-in-you in the street kind of experience. She was B.E.A.M.I.N.G (I even thought for a moment she was pregnant but as it turned out, she was not).
I study people’s behaviours and beliefs and how to change them, so of course, I asked her: ‘what’s up? You look so happy!’ She said she was happy indeed, but for no specific reasons at all, the weather maybe (warmer), her new clothes (cooler), or anything else. She was just happy. Funny thing, spending 5mn with her made ME happy as well.
That afternoon (about 4 hours later), Julia called me. Someone had bumped into her new car (while it was parked), and damaged the front door. She was F.U.R.I.O.U.S! ‘The worst day EVER’ she said.
Daniel Kahneman, the founder of Behavioural Economics, relates a similar story in his engrossing Ted talk video “The Riddle Of Experience vs. Memory”: a young man who had enjoyed a delightful concert, was upset by a scratching noise at the end that ‘ruined the whole experience’.
We have all seen dozens of similar situations involving travels, business deals, outings and all sorts of experiences and events. How are we so influenced by the LAST thing that happens in a day, an event, an experience?
Because, he says, there are two selves: an experiencing self and a remembering self. The experiencing self… well, experiences, living in the present, every second, every minute. In NLP, we call this the ‘level of experience’ which involves our 5 senses: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory and gustatory (mnemonic: VAKOG).
The remembering self on the other hand… remembers (did you guess?). In the previous example, the experiencing self enjoys the music (in the present), while the remembering self deletes everything but the scratching noise at the end, and from there, stores the memory of the whole experience as unpleasant.
Why should you care?
Wise question. Think for a minute: how do you make decisions? What do you base your decision on? Memories. In fact, the more rational we try to be about decision making, the more we need to recall previous information. The hiccup as Kahneman puts it, is that “we don’t choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences.” And those differ widely from person to person. This means that all areas of our lives are affected by a selective process that happens completely outside of our awareness.
“The Problem with Eyewitness Testimony”, a talk by Barbara Tversky, Professor of Psychology & George Fisher, Professor of Law (related in the Stanford Journal of Legal Studies), mentions that ‘Elizabeth Loftus performed experiments in the mid-seventies demonstrating the effect of a third party’s introducing false facts into memory. Subjects were shown a slide of a car at an intersection with either a yield sign or a stop sign. Experimenters asked participants questions, falsely introducing the term “stop sign” into the question instead of referring to the yield sign participants had actually seen. Similarly, experimenters falsely substituted the term “yield sign” in questions directed to participants who had actually seen the stop sign slide. The results indicated that subjects remembered seeing the false image. In the initial part of the experiment, subjects also viewed a slide showing a car accident. Some subjects were later asked how fast the cars were traveling when they “hit” each other; others were asked how fast the cars were traveling when they “smashed” into each other. Those subjects questioned using the word “smashed” were more likely to report having seen broken glass in the original slide. The introduction of false cues altered participants’ memories.’
There’s a reason why doctors give kids lollypops after their visit! (The smart doctors at least).
What if you could get back some control over the unconscious selective process? Decide (to a certain extend) how you store memories in a way that made justice to the experiences you have? and by the same token, bring SOME objectivity to decision-making? NLP offers a range of techniques to fine tune how we encode information, and therefore memories.
Check the Schedule of All Workshops website to see date of the next NLP certification.