A Practical Guide to NLP for Work

A Practical Guide

Dianne Lowther

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781848313811
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Careers

Neurolinguistic Programming is about helping you to identify and develop the patterns of thought and behaviour which are most beneficial to you. Introducing NLP for Work teaches you how to build a successful rapport with your colleagues, enabling you to deal effectively with any problems and master any situation.

1. The NLP language and communication model

I want to begin by looking at a diagram.

This diagram shows the ‘NLP language and communication model’. This is a representation of how we process information via our senses and then respond to what we perceive.

Let’s start in the top left of the diagram with information coming in from the outside world and into your senses. On the diagram it looks as if it’s coming in at eye level but it is intended to represent all of your senses. The function of your senses is to translate external information into neurological impulses so that your brain can make sense of them. So, for example, your eyes transform different wavelengths of light into different kinds of neural signals so that your brain then creates a pattern of information on the visual cortex at the back of your brain. Each of our senses translates external information into neurological impulses and that’s the first level of transformation that happens.

The result of this is the first level of representation, what John Grinder calls ‘first access’. You’ll see on the diagram that it’s also labelled with the initials V A K O G. This stands for visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory – our five senses. One thing it’s important to realize at this stage is that the kinaesthetic here is purely sensory information, not emotional information. We don’t detect our emotional feelings in the outside world, we only detect things like texture and temperature and weight, so it’s purely sensory kinaesthetics at first access.

What we’ve got here is a first-level representation of reality that is purely sensory. Notice that there are no words at first access. This is the level of perception that a very small child would have before they learn language. But, of course, what makes us human, what makes us different from other species, is that we do have language, and our ability to ‘make sense’ of things using language is really what sets us apart.

Deletion, distortion and generalization

The second stage of transformation is when that sensory information is labelled with words and it becomes our internal reality. Referring back to the diagram of the NLP language and communication model, you will see the second phase where the sensory information goes through the linguistic filters. Below the ‘Filters’ heading is a short list of what the filters do: they delete, distort and generalize. Below that is the list of what the filters are. There are lots of different kinds of filters and the list on the diagram is a representative one: it’s not completely exhaustive but it will cover most of the things that we need to talk about. So I’m going to come back and deal with that in a bit more detail, but first let’s talk about the idea of deletion, distortion and generalization, because this is what language does.

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When we talk about deletion, it’s not like you would delete a file from your PC and then it’s gone. When we refer to deletion in terms of language it’s more accurate to think about it as what we are not paying attention to.

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Deletion can also happen at sensory level. For example, if you live near a train station or an airport, you probably find that after a while, you no longer notice the sounds coming from the trains or the aeroplanes, but if someone comes to visit they really notice it. ‘How do you live with the noise?’ they cry and you say, ‘What noise?’ because it’s just disappeared from your conscious awareness. In the same way, we delete things from language that we think we don’t need to talk about. Sometimes that’s useful, sometimes it can lead to misunderstanding.

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The same thing is true of distortions. Again, distortions can happen at a sensory level – things like optical illusions – but also distortions can happen in language because sometimes we have a tendency to want to make things fit with our reality. So we might slightly distort the way something is to make it fit in with our preconceived ideas. Then, when we talk about it, we talk about it as if it is the way we’d like it to be rather than acknowledging that in some ways it’s slightly different. That’s a distortion of the information we’re getting from the outside world.

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Generalization is the third thing that the filters do. As it sounds, that means making a principle or taking a general idea on the basis of a small amount of information.

When we generalize, we have one or two experiences, we make sense of those, and on that basis, we say, ‘This must be true,’ in a whole variety of different situations. We’re taking information from one context and assuming that it would be true in a lot more. To do this is necessary because if you couldn’t generalize, every time you changed your car you’d have to learn how to drive all over again. Every time you went to a different office, you’d have to learn how to open the door! However, generalization is also at the heart of all bias and prejudice, so it’s not always a useful process.

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So deletion, distortion and generalization have their uses and clearly that’s why they have evolved as part of the way we interact with the world, but they also can cause problems if we’re not aware of what we’re doing.

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When the information has come in from the outside world, it goes through two stages of transformation: the first one is at a sensory level and the second level is at a linguistic level where we label our experience, put words to it and literally make sense out of it. The end result of this is what we call our internal representation of reality.

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Internal representation, conscious and unconscious

Your internal representation of the world has two elements to it: there’s a conscious part and there’s an unconscious part. Look again at the diagram on here and see how this is represented. At the top, the conscious area, we’ve got V A K O G – visual, auditory, kinaesthetic, olfactory and gustatory – again to represent the sensory information that we’re consciously aware of. We’ve also got an added element now, which is our conscious thought process. In other words, it’s what we’re saying to ourselves.

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Do you talk to yourself? Some people think that they don’t talk to themselves and some people know that they do and are a little embarrassed to admit it. So let me tell you that if you talk to yourself, inside your own head, that’s completely normal. Some people even talk to themselves out loud and that’s actually not as abnormal as you might think!

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Obviously it’s a hard thing to measure but informal research suggests that most people talk to themselves more than half the time that they’re awake. In fact, the only time that we switch off that ‘running commentary’ inside our heads is when we’re completely engrossed in doing something. That might be just watching a movie, it might be getting engrossed in a piece of work or it might be playing a sport. You’ve probably heard athletes talk about ‘getting in the zone’ which is when they stop thinking about what they’re doing and just do it. So there are times when we switch off that commentary but often, when we’re just going about doing our daily routines, we chat to ourselves inside.

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It can be an interesting experience to start paying attention to what you’re saying to yourself because some of us are not quite as polite in talking to ourselves as we might be talking to other people!

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What we say to ourselves, alongside all the sensory information, is a very important part of our conscious thinking. That conscious thinking interacts with the other part, which is the representation of reality that’s outside of conscious awareness. The experts say that everything that happens to us, every thought that we have, every bit of information that we come across is recorded somewhere in the deep recesses of our brain. Some of that information we can get out again very easily and some of it is more difficult to access. But in terms of relative size, the unconscious part of your mind is very much bigger than the conscious part. You can really only do one thing at a time consciously but always in the background, unconsciously, you’re doing lots of other things. That’s why sometimes you might go to bed wondering about how to tackle a particular situation in your job and the next morning, thinking that you haven’t really moved on very much, you suddenly realize that you’ve got the answer to the problem because, while you were asleep, the unconscious part of your mind was still working on the ideas.

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Before you go to sleep tonight, set the unconscious part of your mind a task to do. It might be a problem to solve, an idea to create or a decision to make. Explain the task to yourself in the same way as you would pass on a task to a colleague. Notice what has happened when you wake up tomorrow.

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You have probably already realized that there’s a lot going on outside of conscious awareness. The unconscious part of your mind is also the storage place for everything that you know.

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If I was to ask you for your phone number, even though you weren’t thinking about it until I asked, you would be able to answer me immediately because the information comes out of your unconscious storage and into conscious awareness instantly. You can tell me what the number is, and then it will leave your conscious thoughts again.

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Thinking about the relative sizes of the conscious and unconscious part so your mind, the metaphor that I like the most is this:

Imagine you are standing in the middle of a large, round theatre, in complete darkness but with a very powerful pencil-beam torch in your hand. Think about how much of the theatre you could light up. It would only be a very small amount at a time. You could light up most of the theatre … but not all at once.

That’s what your conscious awareness is like in relation to your unconscious mind, because we can shine the light on a little tiny bit of information, and we can become consciously aware of a small piece in a given moment but, in order to be aware of something else, we have to let go of the first bit of information we were thinking of. There’s a huge amount of information available at the unconscious level.

Thinking, feeling and physiology

We’ve looked at your internal representation of the world in terms of the sensory information and the conscious thought process. Let’s have a look at how that interacts with the rest of your emotional experience and your body.

Once again, we need to refer back to the diagram of the NLP language and communication model on here. Look at the right-hand side of the diagram. You’ll see that there is a connection between what you think and how you feel and then the physiological experience, lower down the diagram. You may also notice that there is a ‘back door’ route that goes from first access on the far side straight round to physiology. This represents reflex actions – the things that you can’t do anything about, whereby as soon as you see or hear a certain thing, you react physically.

For example, imagine you’re crossing the road and you suddenly notice there’s a car racing towards you that you hadn’t previously noticed: what are you going to do? You’re going to jump out of the way. You’re not going to go through some long thought process about how fast is the car going, the likelihood of it hitting you or whether you have time to move before it does. You’re just going to jump out of the way. That’s an immediate response: straight from the sensory information to a physical action. What will happen as a result of that? It’s probably going to stir up a certain amount of adrenalin and that creates emotion. Emotion is just energy in motion around your body. Some people feel that, and some people don’t. But suppose you’ve just jumped out of the way of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About the Author
• Author’s Note
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The NLP language and communication model
• 2. The presuppositions of NLP
• 3. Outcome thinking
• 4. Rapport, pacing and leading
• 5. Rep systems
• 6. Perceptual positions
• 7. Submodalities
• 8. Strategies
• 9. Modelling
• 10. Language
• A final word
• Resources
• Index