Why Is NLP Effective (Part 2)

In my last email, I was talking about the question Caroline asked me:
You claim that NLP is one of the most effective change technology in existence today. Why is so effective?

You remember that the crucial question we ask ourselves in NLP coaching is:
What has to happen in this person’s mind to bring about the presenting problem?
We want to understand how the person creates an internal representation that allows this problem to exist. Internal representations are made up of pictures, sounds, feelings, smells and tastes.
How do they have to combine to create the issue at hand?

Read my last email.

And you also know that in NLP coaching, we focus on PROCESS, not content.
This is truly important. It is the core of everything we do. A process is a sequence of steps that combine in a certain order to create a given outcome. The idea is that if you change the order of the steps in the sequence or delete one of the steps, then the end result, the outcome changes.

An illustration of this is making bread. To get a loaf that is the right blend of crispy and smooth, you want to add the ingredients in a certain sequence, a certain order. If you mix together some ingredients that don’t agree, the end result is not bread.

Today, I want to give you another example of the process-driven ways of NLP. Process-driven means that as a coach, you do not focus on content, and in order to generate positive change, you don’t need to ask your clients to remember and relive past traumatic experiences.

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Just a note before I go into more details.

Sometimes, students who have been trained in other techniques and skills relating to human psychology, feel that they have to sympathise with the stories presented by their clients. Some techniques require clients to relive the trauma in order to ‘purge’ the emotion, or analyse why they feel that way.

From an NLP point of view, when someone is made to relive a traumatic previous experience, the person becomes “associated” with the experience. “Associated” means that all their senses are triggered the same way as it was during the event, so that they relive it in their body and their mind.

The problem with this is: Our unconscious mind does not differentiate between what’s real or not. Have you ever felt an emotion while watching a movie, or been suddenly woken up from a bad nightmare panting and sweating? Nothing ‘real’ had happened, but you experienced a physiological reaction nevertheless.

Thoughts do trigger very strong physiological reactions, and the fabric of our experience is created through our perceptions, i.e our 5 senses. Language comes as an added very thin surface layer on top of it. When you talk and rationalise about something, you do not modify the underlying fabric of the experience. When you relive a trauma, you solidify the experience, you anchor it more deeply in your neurology, strengthen the associated neurological pathways, and reinforce the automatic negative triggers that start a chain reaction, and which ends up as something like: ‘I think about X, I feel strong negative emotion Y’.

What we do in NLP is to change that fabric, change the experience itself. The triggers loose their power and disappear, the emotions and the rationalisations associated with the old experience as well.
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Last time, I explained how to change the “submodalities” of a picture to change how we feel about an experience. Today, let me give you another example of process you can use to change a behaviour. This time we are talking about ‘strategies‘.

Some time ago, I met a lady who had a young son. We were talking about behaviours and how to change them. One thing leading to another, she eventually told me that there was one issue that bothered her greatly, and asked me whether I could advise her on a direction to folow. Her young son was in the habit of throwing noisy temper tantrums in front of everyone when she refused to buy him something. He was so loud and going about it so wholeheartedly that she would invariably give up and buy him whatever he wanted. This had been going on for a while and she was at a a loss as to what to do.

This is a beautiful example of what in NLP, we call ‘strategies’, a sequence of steps that create a certain outcome.

He asks — she refuses — he falls to the floor shouting loudly — she begs him to be quiet — he shout even louder — she gives up. The result: he gets a toy. And this works every time.

You think that this is an isolated example of bad parenting?
Maybe, but it is only a flagrant example of a process that goes on in everyone’s mind, maybe more subtly, at all time. A series of trigers producing a certain result.

We have strategies for everything! Byuing is a big one (that the marketing and sales industry has been studying for years) and you will elicit your own buying strategies during the NLP practitioner course, but not only. We even have strategies for falling in love!

It is usually very easy to change a strategy. You just need to 1. identify the steps & the trigger and 2. interrupt the sequence as early as possible. In this case, the trigger is Mom says no, which triggers falling on the floor, which triggers Mum begging etc… The more intense the interruption, the faster the strategy is destroyed.

So what I advised her the following: when he falls to the floor, you do the same, but bigger. Have the BIGEST temper tantrum in the history of temper tantrums! To say the truth, she did not try that right away, she felt much to self conscious. But about 3 months later, I got a call from her; finally she had gathered the courage to do it, and it worked beautifully. When she started her little boy stopped all he was doing and watched her for a minute with his mouth wide open standing on the side. When she was done, she smiled at him, took his hand and they left without a word. That was 2 months ago, and he had not ever done one of his shoping temper tantrums again.

What we had just done was merely to create an intense interruption in the sequence of steps, and the outcome had totally changed. This was not the only possible way to interrupt this strategy by the way, but it was intense enough and in the end, rather fun!

Do you see how easy that was?

Strategies are an invaluable tool to assist people change habits and behaviors. We use them all the time in business, to change behaviors but also to understand how other people function and deal with them in a way that is mutually profitable.

Questions or comments? Email or post a comment on the blog.

Want to learn how to do this, as well as discover your own strategies for buying stuff, taking decisions, or even falling in love 🙂 come to the next NLP Practitioner and Coaching Certification training.

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