How to Succeed with NLP

Go from Good to Great at Work

Anne Watson

• Publisher: Capstone
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780857080271
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Small Business
• Index: Business

Think like the best and succeed like the best

Ever wondered how some people always manage to succeed? Well wonder no longer, How to Succeed with NLP examines exactly how those people do it and breaks down everything you need to know to emulate their success. This energising book shows you how to change your mindset and alter your behaviour to become the most valuable asset in your company. The NLP techniques will provide any ambitious, eager person with the perfect toolkit to get ahead.

You will learn how to; increase your confidence, improve your influencing skills, handle conflict situations, dispel anxious feelings, trust your intuition, create a rapport with others, be more effective in your communication, understand and use body language, define the results you want and set about achieving them.

1

Your Route to Success with NLP Signposts

Setting the scene

Think about that moment when you wake up in the morning. Do you bounce out of bed with enthusiasm or do you eventually crawl out yawning? A reluctance to get up is not just physical tiredness, it is mental tiredness as well. People who love life and who look forward to their day are glad to get up. If life is not like that for you, then decide now that you will regain the high levels of motivation and career hunger that bring satisfaction at all levels. This is the time to manage your own motivation and to fire up the passion for personal success and reward. It is easy to slip into comfortable ways in a job and not be aware of time slipping past. Are you sure that every day brings with it something new and an opportunity to test yourself in different ways? Falling into ways that are routine and predictable is not the route to take if you want to make yourself stand out and grow a satisfying career. Great people are enthusiastic and energetic, seeking out their own motivation. If it does not naturally come your way at the moment, then use the ideas and techniques in this book to find new life and vitality in the skills that you bring to your job and the energy you bring to your team. Now is the time to aim higher, do more, give more and ultimately get more.

Statistics show that one person in five goes to work and does an outstanding job. The rest do either a good job, an average job or a below average one. Success will come if you put yourself in that top 20% of highly effective people and, better still, influence people around you or in your team to give more of themselves to the job. Then tangible differences will be made, businesses will thrive and you will be acknowledged. People who are eager and ambitious need to have a stockpile of behavioural tools and techniques that they have mastered. These will help facilitate meaningful change and personal advancement. Successful people are purposeful and they know that flexibility is the key to success. Now is the time to focus on what you want out of life and what you are prepared to change to achieve it.

What do you really need to do to be successful? How do you set your goals, achieve these results, overcome obstacles along the way and have the influence over your work that you need to? How can you have more influence over other people and make sure that your negotiations lead to success? To enjoy your career, create harmonious and productive relationships in the workplace and progress with commensurate financial reward, you will need to be confident that you are making the right impact and developing the level of self mastery required to be effective. This way you will be sure that you are behaving in a way that brings you the response you are looking for. The result of that is that you will live the life that you want.

What can I do for my employer?

Today, most people will be doing more work in the same hours and for the same pay or, worse, for a pay cut, and with no bonuses. Long-term views of careers may be hard to find as it is well nigh impossible to know what is going on behind the closed doors of the board room.

For you, what does this mean? How can you be sure that you are appreciated and your contribution is acknowledged? How can you improve your performance and develop your skills when it would seem that budgets have been cut and there is no money available for the kind of training and development programme that you would ideally like to follow? Perhaps there is a feeling that life is not under your control but under that of the employers. How do you use all of your skills to do the best you can and to make sure you are valued?

The starting point of thinking will be to recognize that the only way to live is by accepting that you are in control of your own life, so it is all down to you. Although we cannot choose the circumstances in which we are born and brought up and although we don’t know what can happen to us along the way, we can alter how we react to them. Control lies in how you respond to life. Look at the successful people in your organization who seem to be valued and appreciated. They are no different from you and no more capable than you. However, it is highly likely that they probably have more self belief, more motivation and they will actively seek out opportunities to improve their fortunes. Look at these people hard because they are your role models and you will soon be adopting and improving on their techniques that have taken them to the top of their field.

If you also decide to start thinking about ‘What can I do for my employer’ rather than ‘What can my employer do for me?’ you will have made two major shifts in attitude that will already reap extraordinary results. Show your employer how good you are and your employer will want to support you in all the ways that will add to your success.

Becoming a prized asset

More than this, how do you make sure that you are the most prized asset that your employer has got? How do you make yourself indispensable and make sure that you are seen in a different and positive light? When you shift your personal performance from good to great, you will be able to command the next stage of your career and be that rare commodity an organization is looking for – a brilliant contributor. Reliance on an employer to be the person who controls the development of your career is a thing of the past. There is now a mutual responsibility and it is not just academic qualifications that make a rounded and valued employee. Make sure your boss appreciates you and you will then be in a better bargaining position for moulding your role to suit your growing skill-set.

Alex Mitchell, Head of Influencer Relations at the Institute of Directors, believes firmly that you are 100% in control of your success. A particular passion of his is to ensure that young school leavers and graduates find their way into jobs that will allow them to develop their talents to the full. He advocates a path into the workplace via meaningful volunteering where skills such as project management, leadership, budgeting, self-discipline and team playing can all be learnt. These are tangible, practical skills that can be added to any academic qualifications, thus increasing chances at interview and in the job market. Structured skills based volunteering is a way to give back to the community while gaining useful skills.

The next vital piece for Alex is ensuring that business leaders pay close attention to this experience won in a different yet valid environment. Alex’s vocabulary is made of the words that you want to hear – inspirational, challenging, positivity, realism, curiosity. His message is clear – career opportunities may not seem to be around but there are always opportunities to create them for yourself.

What is NLP?

Neuro Linguistic Programming is considered by some to be a science of excellence, a means of establishing excellence and then modelling it. Originally developed and promoted in the 1970s by its founders, John Grinder, a linguist, and Dr Richard Bandler, a gestalt therapist and mathematician, it is an effective and rapid way of addressing problems people have in terms of confidence, communication and phobias. They were greatly influenced by the work of Milton Erickson, a renowned psychiatrist who specialized in medical hypnosis. By modelling his way of addressing the unconscious mind through hypnotic language patterns Bandler and Grinder went on to develop NLP as techniques that can be taught to improve personal effectiveness.

The prime focus of this book is learning how to develop the life skills needed to create the life that you want by utilising all of these NLP tools and techniques to the full.

Let’s start with what are called the ‘Presuppositions of Neuro Linguistic Programming’. These are the core beliefs that summarize what NLP is all about, giving the framework within which these tools and techniques have been developed. I will be using these presuppositions throughout the book as signposts. Each one will be explored to see what it means for you and how you can address it to add to your skills in your job.

The presuppositions used are as follows. They will be explained further as we come to each one through the book:

• Everything in NLP should increase choice.

• There is no failure, only feedback.

• People have all the resources they need to succeed.

• If what you are doing is not working, try something different.

• The mind and the body form a linked system.

• The map is not the territory.

• We are always communicating and the meaning of the communication is the response you receive.

• We are all in charge of our minds and therefore our results – the law of cause and effect.

• The person with the greatest flexibility controls the system and will have the greatest influence. There are no resistant people. There are just inflexible communicators.

• Behind every behaviour there is a positive intention.

• People are not their behaviours. Accept the person and change the behaviour.

NLP links language and neurological pathways to a pattern of behavioural techniques that result in the brain being reprogrammed in order to do things more effectively and therefore achieve goals. This means that NLP shows you how to think differently, act differently and get the results that you choose. Add to this the vital application of how this can add zest to your job and increase the control that you have over it and the success you aspire to. Suddenly you can experience the exhilarating feeling that choice lies with you. I will be taking a different presupposition of NLP to guide every chapter and linking it to the desired attributes of successful people.

NLP and you

NLP is not for the intellectually idle. Focus, concentration and consistency will mean that by taking committed short steps and by using tried and tested techniques, behaviour will change and if behaviour changes, then so does everything else. The definition of madness is continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. This is the NLP lucid and clear path to the sanity that change brings with it. You may well be using some of these techniques unconsciously already, so you will be adding to your portfolio of NLP skills. Whatever we call them and whatever they are, the important point is that they work.

The need for clear communication is not restricted to the workplace. Personal relationships depend on you being able to express clearly what you think, what you feel and what you want. What matters in communication is not what you think you are saying but what meaning someone derives from what you have said. Have you ever sent out an e-mail and been taken aback by the tone or content of the response? This is probably because the words you used did not convey the meaning you intended. Add to this the fact that words form only part of communication, in addition to body language and other signs, and you can see that getting it right in the office environment is a path fraught with potential pitfalls.

Change – the route to success

In the course of my work in head hunting and executive coaching, I often find that people want to know how to change and how to get better results. Self-knowledge is a great thing and it is important to know how to use that personal mastery to bring about change where you need it. Self-knowledge needs to be followed by effective action.

‘The person with the greatest flexibility controls the system.’

What does this mean? That the person who is prepared to change is the one who will be more likely to be in control of relationships. By change I mean change of style, change of perspective, change of language, change of mindset, change of tone and general subtle changes of approach.

This book, therefore, will bring you ideas on how to tackle issues that before have seemed impossible. In the course of the book you will work towards a strategy for your personal plan for individual success and you w...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 - Your Route to Success with NLP Signposts
• Chapter 2 - What Does It Take to Get What You Want?
• Chapter 3 - How to Learn From Experience
• Chapter 4 - Positive Attitude
• Chapter 5 - Confidence
• Chapter 6 - Energy
• Chapter 7 - Curiosity
• Chapter 8 - Communication
• Chapter 9 - Decision Making
• Chapter 10 - Flexibility
• Chapter 11 - Team Player
• Chapter 12 - Networking
• Glossary of NLP Terms Used on the Road from Good to Great
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Biodata – The People Who Commented along the Way
• Other Books that You May Find Useful
• Index