AHT Blog - Neuro-Linguistic Programming

Reflections at the end of the last session of the NLP Practitioner Certification Training

By Berry Moore

Monday morning, the last day of the last weekend of the course, I woke up on the wings of an exquisite dream. I had gone on a journey, and found a remarkable town at the foot of a mountain, next to the sea. The place was seeped in tranquility and sunshine, but the most special thing about this town was that the people in it kept geese.

These were lovely geese: sleek, white, beloved and nurtured by the townsfolk. These geese laid golden eggs, and the people knew that as long as they continued to love and care for their geese, the geese would continue to lay golden eggs. They also knew that if they neglected the geese, the birds would die and there would be no more golden eggs.

In my dream, I went home and told my tall, blonde friend, Vanessa, about the amazing place I had discovered.

“How amazing,” said Vanessa. “I’ll have to go there and see for myself. It sounds like the perfect place in which to make my magic goose medicine, using the gwana and feathers of specially selected geese.”

And off went Vanessa.

It wasn’t long before Vanessa called me to come and see how she had set herself up in the town. When I got there, she showed me an incredibly smooth, clear stream which seemed to come down from the very top of a hill on the edge of town, ending in a rock pool of pretty white river stones. The townsfolk had banked the sides of the stream and the entire scene was one of stunning purity.

“Just look at this amazing place I found. It’s perfect. I want you to climb to the top of the hill, sit down in the stream and slide down,” Vanessa said. “And there’s one point on the stream from which you can see the entire coastline!”

I did as Vanessa asked, and found myself sitting at the top of the stream in water that suddenly wasn’t wet, ready to slide down. As I slid, I realised the stream was actually a flight of stairs which were carpetted in plush silver-grey. The water ran totally clear over the carpet. I reached the bottom, sliding right down until my feet were an inch from the point at which the stream joined the rock pool. Vanessa clapped her hands in delight.

“Well done - you went just as far as I did!” she exclaimed.

I sat there looking out over the blue-est sea I have ever seen, feeling the perfection in the sun, the water and the peace that encased the entire scene.

“Who would have thought I would end up here,” I mused silently, looking around with an intense sense of wonder. “Now, all I have to do is find a house.”

Berry Moore is a holistic massage therapist and metaphysical healer. She is also an AHT trained Master Practitioner of NLP.

Reflections at the end of the third session of the NLP Practitioner Certification Training

By Berry Moore

I see myself in the mirror every day. Small changes go unnoticed, and even the more dramatic changes creep up on me. One day I see a photograph of myself, taken a few years ago. Suddenly I notice there are new lines around my eyes, my hair has more grey, the way I hold my body is different. When did that happen, and how?

I have a group of friends I see once a month. I calibrate more immediate changes through their eyes, and this month they have given me some interesting feedback. They see more confidence, they see a more “integrated” person, the way I use my voice is different. One person even expressed interest in doing an NLP Practitioner course in the future - not so much because of what I said about it, but more because of the changes he observed in me.

Food for thought indeed. What, specifically, has changed?

Okay, so I’ve learnt a whole new language and I’ve got all this lovely jargon to play with. I enjoy tapping into people’s submodalities and learning through observation how they experience their world. I’m young enough in this game to verbalise some of my observations - I’m told this can be disconcerting and at times, a trifle threatening. Many people are not comfortable under close surveillance. Great feedback, and a valuable lesson. I need to be more sensitive. As a dedicated kinesthetic, I have to admit that I feel more solid in my identity now than I ever have done. I am more comfortable in my skin, and somehow more connected to the earth, to Spirit and to everyone around me. Responsibility has become a word to be celebrated, not feared. I own my life, and the experience to my great relief is one of lightness, not burden.

All this, after the third weekend of the NLP Practitioner Course? Well, yes. Some of the processes on that third weekend were simply awesome. There is a process of integration as I continue weaving NLP into my daily life, both at work and around family.

My work is changing. Long ago, my massage teacher told me massage was an art form, and I would develop my own art. After I studied Metaphysical Healing, I learned that each treatment was different and I learned to “listen” to the signals my own body gave me about the needs of each individual. Then I learned about journey therapy. Again, I found that the script was simply a basis - some clients needed a slightly different script. And now I have NLP, and it brings an almost daily reminder that by changing a client’s view of one small issue, their perspectives on many other issues are shifted. It’s a bit like giving my clients a mix-and-match wardrobe: using the same garments, you never have to wear the same ensemble twice - unless you want to, of course.

A chiropractor makes one small adjustment and suddenly the entire spine clicks back into alignment. Alignment is a good word to use in connection with NLP: it’s about aligning one’s life so that conflict between where you are and where you want to be, what you are doing and what you want to be doing, is minimised.

Already I see shifts happening in my own life that I hadn’t expected. My practice is expanding, my activities in areas in which I’m not entirely comfortable, such as journalism, are decreasing, and issues around providing a permanent home for my children are sorting themselves out. I have set my intention, I have options now, and I feel empowered. There are those who insist that all growth must be painful. I may have believed that, once. Now, I find myself smiling as I write.

Who would have thought that all this growth could be achieved with such love, light and laughter?

Berry Moore is a holistic massage therapist and metaphysical healer. She is also an AHT trained Master Practitioner of NLP.

Reflections at the end of the second session of the NLP Practitioner Certification Training

By Berry Moore

I’ve been dreaming a lot recently.

That in itself is not unusual.What’s different about my dreams in recent weeks is that I’ve been writing them down, observing patterns, and finding that many of the dreams are metaphors for issues in my life.

I am surrounded by metaphors. They’re in the movies, they’re in every book I read to my children, they’re in the little daily events my friends relate over coffee, they’re in my kitchen. I guess they’ve always been there, somewhere.

The second weekend of the NLP Practitioner Course has left me feeling that I am walking always on shifting sand. My perspective on life seems higher, broader, more expansive. The boundaries have changed, everything is connected after all, and now I’m not sure where you end and where I begin. It’s as if someone joined the dots and the picture turned out to be… a maze!

Knowledge and awareness bring responsibility. I am not always comfortable with this new way of recognising people and situations. I feel somewhat confronted by life at times, and at other times I feel the new knowledge has opened up endless possibilities for adventure and delight. There have been some intensely special “Oh Wow” moments as I notice perspectives shifting, and new pictures emerging. Yes, I feel closer to me. I feel closer to my clients. And to my children.

My job is to make people feel better. I call it Energy Therapy, and I use massage, Reiki and Aromatherapy techniques to achieve this. I’ve been using NLP too, and in order to do that effectively I believe I have to “live the experience” myself. The most profound moment of the second weekend for me was walking through the eight Logical Levels and watching how changing a belief at one level brought everything else into alignment. It was confrontational, difficult, and inspirational. Now I watch the shifts as I use this experience to the benefit of my clients.

I’m taking baby steps, adapting my minimal knowledge and experience to a level where both my client and I can feel comfortable. And it works!

I met a man I admired greatly, a policeman who has made it his mission to give what he calls motivational workshops to police at grassroots level. He doesn’t know it, but he is a master of some of the most powerful NLP techniques we’ve been studying. I watched him manouvre effortlessly through a day composed of the full range of the heirarchy of ideas. Milton himself would have been so impressed as the man gazed into the distance and told senior police personnel in slow, hypnotically picturesque language about a farmer and some birds and a field of wheat. Gregory Bateson and Robert Dilts may have smiled to watch him chunk down to focussed, specific administrative questions as he checked the work of a junior clerk.

I learned a lot, probably more than I consciously realise. I was in a conflict situation, and I don’t handle conflict well. I dreamed the woman concerned confronted me in my own kitchen, and stuck her toe in my ear. Her red sock had a hole in it, and I said so. She still wanted to fight, so we pulled silly faces at each other until we were both nearly crying with laughter.

So, when would I use a metaphor? Oh, anytime. Berry Moore is a holistic massage therapist and metaphysical healer. She is also an AHT trained Master Practitioner of NLP.

Reflections at the end of the first session of the NLP Practitioner Certification Training

By Berry Moore

Eyes have always been a big thing in my family. My mom says eyes reflect the soul, and that’s what makes some eyes more attractive than others. Now it seems there are a whole lot more reasons for watching eyes … consider the scene: I asked my best friend if he could remember the curtains in his childhood bedroom. Ping! His eyeballs shot to the top right corner, and before he could say anything I clapped my hands in delight and exclaimed “Oh wow, you did it!” My friend was confused. “Did what ?” he asked. “Went into visual recall. Don’t worry, it’s a thing people do, quite normal,” I reassured him airily, but he didn’t look enlightened so I just smiled and went back to my books.

It’s been fun, since that first weekend, watching people’s eye patterns, watching their reactions as I “mirror” their body language. Or not. Suddenly, instead of watching myself to make sure I’m saying what I mean, I find myself watching the person I’m communicating with to check what they are hearing. I’m playing a new game, called: “What I said may - or may not - have been what you heard”. And the world, it seems, is playing it with me.

NLP is not like an ice-cream, delightful but enjoyed only by the consumer. It’s more like a ripple of laughter, expanding outwards and creating more ripples and causing people to smile without knowing why - and who knows where that might end ? Once I saw a poster of a large gorilla lazing in a grassy glade, scratching his head. The caption was: “Just when I learnt all of life’s answer’s, they changed all the questions!” The first weekend of the Neuro-Linguistic Programming course is a bit like that. I always thought the question was “Why ?” For example, “Why don’t I have what I want ?”, “Why am I here ?” Now, it seems, halfway through my life, the real question is “How ?” as in, “How do I get what I want ?”, “How did I get where I am ?” … “or not”. Somehow - there’s that word again - changing the focus seems to bring the intangible closer, like grabbing clouds and finding … cottonwool. How do I describe those “oh wow!” moments when ideas floating in the air suddenly land and become crystalized, graspable, visible?

Fifteen of us chose to participate in this course, arriving as a diverse group of strangers from a wide array of backgrounds, circumstances and career paths. Some of us see the point - or not; some of us dance to a different tune. Some of us think it all makes perfect sense - or not. And some of us just feel we’re moving in the right direction. We’ve laughed a lot together, shared - cautiously, at first - our ideas, and established that miraculous trust that strangers offer each other within the perceived safe confines of an intimate course such as this one. Just one quarter of the way through the NLP Practitioner course, I find myself struggling to contain an expanded view of my world in a few words. I’m learning a new language, wading through a sea of new expressions like predicates, modalities, pacing, leading, eye patterns, sensory acuity, rep. systems, matching and mismatching … ideas and words are falling over themselves, and I’m afraid of giving away just how little I really know. How much I still have to learn.

Yes, I feel I have learnt, and grown and experienced, but “how” will I use Neuro-Linguistic Programming - as I know it so far - on a practical level ? I just will. We all do, every day, whether we know it or not. The power of the game lies in using the skills consciously, deliberately, and with positive intent. The value lies in harnessing that elusive power to increase our understanding of ourselves and the people we deal with on a day to day basis, whatever walk of life we happen to be involved in. The beauty of it lies in that most enigmatic dynamic of all - the gift of choice, not only for me but for the delightful souls who populate my world. At least, I think so.

Berry Moore is a holistic massage therapist and metaphysical healer. She is also an AHT trained Master Practitioner of NLP.

Printed in African Leadership Magazine April 2004

Written by Sunny Stout Rostran and Min McLoughlin

Leaders today need to develop the uniqueness within each individual and still foster the spirit and commitment of the team. There is greater and greater demand for leaders who are exemplary managers and coaches, and who show respect for people from diverse cultural backgrounds. Neuro linguistic coaching skills help leaders and coaches alike to bring out the best in themselves, their teams and their organisations. In this article we look at what leadership actually is and how NLP coaching skills can help you to develop leadership competence.

Leadership To Inspire Performance

The exemplary leader is the one who can liberate the ‘leader’ within everyone. Leadership is about enabling your people to become more collaborative and cooperative. It’s no longer just about the content of the work to be done; it’s about the collective value of people who are committed to each other and are willing to work together collaboratively. It’s necessary for you as a leader to bring together hearts and minds to inspire performance that moves beyond the expected to the extraordinary.

There is also a quest for greater meaning in our lives today and a growing yearning for a sense of higher purpose professionally and personally. What can you as a leader do to provide a climate for people to bring their souls to work - not just their physical and mental capabilities? How can you as a leader balance the s pirit of the organisation with its need for profit? And how can you begin to make a difference, restoring hope and creating a sense of meaning in the life of people at work today?

Leaders transform:

• Values into action
• Vision into reality
• Obstacles into innovation
• Individuality into team work
• Risk into success

How can NLP develop leadership competency?

Leadership begins with personal mastery - discovering your own personal sense of direction and purpose. With NLP coaching skills, you as a leader will learn to expand your personal capacity to create the results that you desire. But, in order to do so, leaders need to develop self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and interpersonal skills.

There are six core leadership competencies that NLP helps you to develop:

1.  Model the way forward

2.  Inspire a shared vision

3.  Become a pioneer

4.  Learn from success and failure

5.  Enable others

6.  Encourage hearts and minds

So What Is NLP?

It has been defined in many ways. NLP is known as the art and science of excellence, and as the study of subjective experience. But essentially and more importantly for l eaders, NLP is about context, process and structure. In other words, it’s not the content of what you do or say that matters, it is how you do what you do as a leader. And finally, it’s how you model excellence and learn the lessons from what isn’t working.

Neuro (N)

Refers to the nervous system, or the mind, through which our experience is processed via five our senses: Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic, Olfactory and Gustatory.

Linguistic (L)

Refers to language and other non-verbal communication systems through which our neural representations are coded, ordered and given meaning. This includes: Pictures, Sounds, Feelings, Tastes, Smells and Words (Self Talk).

Programming (P)

This is our ability to understand and use the programmes that we run (i.e. our communication to ourselves and others) in our neurological systems to achieve our specific and desired outcomes. In other words, NLP is how to use the language of the mind to consistently achieve our specific and desired outcomes.

Understanding The Simple Power Of How You Think

One of my clients is a pro golfer with whom I work regularly to help him manage his thinking on the golf course. With the use of exercises such as the one below, he has learned how to cancel out the sound of the crowds, to visualise a putt successfully and move on to the next hole without thinking about a previous unsuccessful drive.

Try this exercise that we consistently use with leaders to help them understand not only the power of the mind, but also how to ‘run their own brain’:

1.  Pleasant memory

Take a pleasant memory from your past and literally make the colours stronger and more intense. How does having a ‘colourful past’ change the intensity of your response to that memory?

If you don’t notice a difference in your feelings when you make your memory more colourful, try seeing that memory in black and white. As the image loses its colour, typically your response will be weaker.

2.  Add sparkle to your life

Think of another pleasant experience, and literally sprinkle your image of it with little shining points of sparkling light, and notice how that affects your feeling response (TV and cinema advertisers know all about this!)

3.  Put your past behind you

This is common advice for unpleasant events. Think of a memory that still makes you feel bad, and notice where you see it now. How far away is the picture? It’s probably pretty close in front of you. So take that picture and move it, physically, far behind you. Or, as you move it away from you, put a rocket launcher underneath it and rocket it into the sky. Know that you can get that memory back any time you want it, but for now it is no longer in your way. How does that change how you experience that memory?

Coaching To Develop Leadership Potential

For the past ten years there has been considerable interest in coaches and mentors - among human resource directors, organisation development consultants, management consultants, trainers and facilitators. The emphasis has been on accelerating performance for individuals and the organisation. Teamwork, empowerment and improved business performance have been the focus within organisations. However, if organisations are going to make long lasting changes, the individuals within them must change first.

Coaching came onto the work scene in the 80s and today we see a shift taking place within the workplace. Stability and certainty have given way to technological change, economic, educational and community crises - and people at work are affected in every aspect of their personal and professional lives. One resource that has increased the ability to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty is that of the personal or professional coach. Coaching is a skill now required of all leaders.

Coaches look for shifting advantages within the change process. They facilitate behavioural change and self-responsibility in their clients, and ultimately they help improve performance, visioning, teamwork and the ability to take risks.

Coaches help leaders to:

• focus on what they want rather than what they don’t want
• define their outcomes and ensure that they do happen
• achieve goals that are currently eluding them and their teams
• build self-esteem, integrity and experience
• deal with complexity and diversity of thinking
• achieve personal and professional mastery

Visualisation techniques

In order to develop leadership competency, NLP coaches train leaders in visualisation techniques to focus, problem solve, make complex decisions and use different thinking systems (visual, kinesthetic, auditory or auditory digital) in order to gain a different perspective on an individual issue, conflict or problem. For example, one of my clients came to me asking to help her create ’structure’. What we learned was that she thought only in ‘words’ and in ‘feelings’. She could not ’see’ her day, let alone see the way forward with her team. We have been working on her ability to visualise; it has transformed her capacity to structure and organise herself, her time and her business.

The Six Success Factors

Rapport is the first of six success factors we use in NLP to develop leaders to help them to accelerate and improve performance individually and in their teams. When you begin to pay attention to how you meet the other person you can refine your rapport skills and thus enhance your relationship with them. This requires sensitivity on your part. So use your sensory acuity to see, hear, sense, and then match, the other person’s: posture, gestures, breathing, energy level, speech patterns, tonality, rhythm and speed of speech, beliefs and values. Rapport helps you to find common ground when none seems available in a diverse team or organisation.

1.  Developing rapport:

Rapport is a natural part of communication. We do it easily and unconsciously with those with whom we share common goals and values. It’s not so easy with people with whom we feel slightly uncomfortable or ill at ease. To achieve rapport means to be in sync with, to concur simultaneously. If we are out of rapport, we are acting differently to them. For example, if we speak in a loud voice, and they in a soft one, it will be very difficult to create rapport. If they lean forward in excitement, and we are so laid back we nearly fall backwards in our chair, it will be tricky to remain on a similar wavelength. For effective communication you need to meet other people in their model of the world. In this way, they will feel that they are being acknowledged. Rapport integrates verbal and non-verbal communication.

2.  Know your outcome: Know what you want

In NLP we use well-formed conditions to check that you know what you are going for, and to ensure that your behaviour is appropriate and ecological. You may need to check out what the other people involved want, and dovetail your outcomes. Without a well-formed outcome you are more likely to be blown off course by external factors.

3.  Take action: Just do it!

Model your own excellence and learn from what’s not working. There is no such thing as failure, only feedback for what’s working and what’s not working.

4.  Have sensory acuity: how will you know you’re getting what you want?

Become more curious, and become more aware of the effects of what you do. These will become apparent within yourself (your internal state) and will also be discernible in other people. This information comes to you through your five senses: seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and tasting (VAKOG). Notice what is different as a result of your action or thinking. You may choose to see the world as a mirror which is reflecting back the results of your thoughts and behaviours. Notice if you are getting what you want. In our culture it is not normal to notice this kind of information. It is more a case of regaining these skills, rather than of doing anything new.

5.  Have behavioural flexibility: If what you are doing isn’t working, do something different.

Remember that you always have a choice of action. You may find it useful to examine the world from a number of different perceptual positions, perspectives and points of view. The more flexible you are at examining your situation, the more information you will be able to gather and the more choices you will discover. It is useful to give yourself at least three possibilities (your position, their position and a meta position).

With clients we work with third position thinking to encourage seeing a problem or conflict situation from another point of view. One client (an editor of a woman’s magazine) who came to work with me said she just couldn’t understand her boss; they were constantly arguing. By using third position thinking she was able to put herself in her own shoes, her boss’s shoes, and get the learning she needed from a ‘meta’ or ‘umbrellia’ position. Only then was she able to change her behaviour, and ultimately affect change in her boss’s behaviour.

6.  Operate from a physiology & psychology of excellence:

You can do whatever you want. One of the presuppositions of NLP is that you already have all the resources you need available to you, and that these resources are accessible to you at any time. Learn how to access these resources, at appropriate times and places so that you can achieve excellence in everything that you do.

How To Be In Rapport

To move into rapport, notice how others move, how they sit, how they speak. Begin to slowly adjust your body movements to match theirs. It’s important not to mimic their rhythm, just move in accordance with it. Slowly begin to adjust your actions, your voice and your posture to be more in sync with them.

This conscious initiation of rapport will create harmony with others, but at the level of ‘unconscious’ behaviour. They won’t be consciously aware of what you are doing, unless you mirror them exactly. Notice how friends, who are naturally in rapport, literally move together, matching words, gestures and tone of voice. It’s like watching a dance.

Powerful ways of matching include posture, tone of voice, body and facial expressions, and even your rate of breathing. Notice the rhythm of their language, the pitch and pace of their speech. Pay attention to their physical movements. Do they sit still, or express themselves with their hand gestures and facial expressions? To get into physical rapport with each other, begin to align your voice, facial expression, body movement and posture.

To build rapport, it’s important to:

• Create physical and emotional empathy.
• Build relationships based on shared values and goals.
• Encourage positive, reflective communication and a feeling of safety.
• Be authentic and sincere in your communication.
• Match the others sensory acuity and way of seeing the world.

Visual thinkers

Use words like: see, picture, sight, looks, view, overview, focus, clear, looks right. Remember events and experiences by the songs they were listening to at the time at the world through visual images and understands by making pictures of the meaning. Need graphics and illustrations and loves to read, watch TV, see movies, daydream.

Auditory thinkers

Use words like: sound, hear, sounds like, tune, harmony, loud, tell me. Listen to what people have to say and accept it if it sounds right, or they like the tone of voice the person used. Sing while they work or listen to music while studying.

Kinesthetic thinkers

Use words like: feels, handle, cool, touch, heavy, hard, pressure, grasp. Get a feel for things and people. Want to touch people and things, strokes animals, picks things up and plays with them. Use whole body movements or hands when describing something.

Logic & Common Sense thinkers

Use words like: logic, common sense, reason, system, understand, make sense of, analyse, know. Need to understand why something is important, instructions have to make sense, everything must be ordered and logical. Enjoy printed details and flow charts.

New Light Through Old Windows

What can you learn from past experiences? How can you look at the past from a different perspective, from a perspective of learning? This exercise is to develop performance. It helps leaders to see something they’ve experienced in the past that they were unhappy with or that has remained unresolved. ‘New Light Through Old Windows’ offers a new way of seeing.

Use this strategy to obtain new learning from a past experience in life. Do not, however, use this exercise for an experience that was traumatic, or caused great pain or sadness to the person. That experience would require counselling.

New light exercise

1.  Think of an experience that holds negative connotations for you, but not something that is traumatic.

Ask your clients to really get in touch with that experience. They may wish to close their eyes.

When one of my entrepreneurial clients first did this exercise, she thought of the day she was made redundant from a very prestigious leadership. She was unaware that she was to be dismissed, and was shocked at the insensitive way it was handled.

2.  Check they are associated.

Have a look at their face, hands, feet. Are they physiologically in tune with that past experience?

When she thought of this experience, her body went into a kind of automatic shock. Her jaw tensed, her body tensed. She could not think clearly. Her feelings felt raw. The situation seemed unreal.

3.  Run the movie

Ask your clients to run a movie, in their mind’s eye, of that experience. Suggest that they put up a cinema screen (in their mind’s eye) in front of them, perhaps twenty feet away. Suggest they start the memory reels rolling. Have them run the movie, from start to finish, of that experience. It’s important that you tell them to: “See yourself in the film, as if you are looking at it back there, then.” Ask them to: “Have a look at your younger self, back there, then.”

This helps them to keep their distance between where they are now, in their present life, and back there at a younger them, at a past experience. Give them time.

When my client did this, she turned her head to the left, looked up and slightly to the left. She put up a movie screen and ran the movie, from the beginningright until the end of that experience. She could see herself looking somewhat understandably distraught and frustrated.

4.  What is the learning?

Say to them, “As you stay with me here, today, look back on that experience. What learning can you gain from watching you back there, then”? Once they have acknowledged that they know, ask them to slowly become conscious of themselves back in the room, with you.

When she runs this movie, it occurs to her, each time, to be prepared for anything. The biggest learning for her is that there is no such thing as failure. She wasn’t made redundant because she was a failure. In fact, she had done very well. She just didn’t fit the mould with the management. Her learning came later. At the time, though, the experience was shocking. In fact, they were trying to get her to go on a pretence, which did not set well with mher values. Fortunately she handled it well. She has grown since that event, which she now feels has enhanced her skills and expertise.

5.  Future vision

It’s important to take this learning into a future experience, where it may be useful. Ask your client to think of a future event where this learning may be useful, given that you know you can now behave differently.

For her, she learned the lesson well. She now uses this to envision working with her new team. It helps her to remember that she is good at what she does, but that there is learning from every interaction. It also reminds her to learn from every experience, positive and negative.

In conclusion

As a leader, NLP coaching skills can help you to harness the creativity and innovation within yourself, your team and your organisation. Leadership is not about being in a leadership position. It’s about having the courage and the spirit to make a difference - developing the leader in everyone.

Business news Sunday times

Marcia Klein and Adele Shevel

Businesses are devoting more time and money to human capital, recognising that unlocking this resource is good for the bottom line. Life coaches - often referred to as executive coaches - help people set clear goals and work towards achieving them within a clear time frame.

A review by Harvard Management says coaching can have a positive influence on performance, though it is not a short-term process.

Cathy Joy, a San Francisco-based coach, is quoted in the Harvard paper saying coaching taps people’s creativity. It encourages them to be more flexible and adaptable, which can have a substantial effect on the bottom line.

Karin Osler, an executive director of the Centre for Conscious Leadership, based in Cape Town, says coaching is best integrated into leadership development processes: how should people grow as whole beings and then operate as more transformational leaders? It’s about acting with awareness, with greater choice and insight into one’s behaviour and its effect on others, she says.

Craig O’Flaherty, director of the Centre for Coaching at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business, says executive coaching is a new trend in South Africa going back three years. In the US it’s been a profession for about 20 years and in Europe about 10 years. But O’Flaherty says the reaction from corporate South Africa has been positive. Executives are realising there may be more effective ways to operate and they recognise there may be a smarter way of thinking and doing things. The process involves facilitating people to get beyond that which is holding them back, building competencies or more fundamental life or career changes.

Executive coach Margaret Jenks says a coach should not be taken on because it’s the “in thing” to do. “If it’s a bit like a fashion accessory - I have a Beamer and now I have my executive coach - that doesn’t work. It takes a lot of work.”

Zweli Manyathi, chief executive of Branch Delivery at FNB, says there is value in employing life coaches to groom executives at both middle and upper-management levels. “While MBA programmes are quick to teach the intellectual skill, there is another side to the equation that provides executives with the skill to walk the talk and this cannot be taught at university.”

Jenks says coaches need empathy and real objectivity. The relationship between a coach and trainee can last from a few months to several years. There has to be mutual trust and respect.

O’Flaherty says research shows that up to 50% of American Fortune 500 companies now use coaching as part of their management intervention. There are about 10 000 coaches in the US.

Executive coaching in South Africa is being used by a diverse range of industries, including insurers and banks, retailers and oil and energy companies. Some of the companies include Shell, Standard Bank, Nedcor, FNB and Sanlam.

Life coaches tend to come from a background in consulting, are retired executives or they enter through the avenue of psychology.

There is undeniable power in the word. In South Africa we are all too aware of the connotations of words. In many spheres we giving our nation a new vocabulary - one which is respectfully positive and devoid of negative, hurtful and inciteful images of the past. And it is working - for example, ubuntu is a word being embraced by all, while native (although meaning ‘one born of a particular place’) is used rarely because of its association with colonial condescension and apartheid laws.

So, if we can acknowledge how words shape behaviour on a macro scale, imagine how empowered we can become as individuals using the same approach on ourselves? Imagine a sales team so empowered, an entire company of workers? Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a system developed by John Grinder, a professor of linguistics, and Richard Bandler, a mathematician and computer programmer with a keen interest in behavioural sciences (gestalt therapy). From their meeting at the University of California in the seventies, they collaborated on discovering and recreating models of human excellence. Through the years NLP has developed some 350 powerful tools and skills for communication and change in many professional areas. And all of it has a common-sense practical application, the results of which are not only tangible but instantly recognisable. Training is offered and books are available to help salespeople to soar and CEOs become dynamic leaders, but after all is said and done, these simple techniques are essentially about getting individuals to change their minds and to talk themselves out of their own limitations and into excellence.

So what is NLP? Each practitioner has a particular way of introducing the concept but in essence, according to NLP trainer and author, Robert Dilts, it considers the three profound components which make up the human experience: neurology, language and programming. Neurology regulates how our bodies function, language determines how we relate and communicate, and programming is about the models we create of our world. Cape Town based trainer and Success Coach, Min McLoughlin, says:

“NLP teaches you how you do what you do; how you take in information from the world around you; what you do with that information inside your head, and how what you do inside your head results in specific physiological reactions, states such as happiness or depression and corresponding behaviours.”

For Armand Kruger, head of Peak Performance Strategies, international NLP trainer, author and consultant who has developed change programmes for a number of industries and disciplines in South Africa, NLP is an

“owner’s manual for the brain. Until the emergence of NLP, we had virtually no understanding of how the software of the brain operated and how it could be programmed or debugged to produce effective behaviours. The brain has a life of its own, especially when it comes to emotions. In other words, psychologists have generally created the impression that if our internal computer works well, then it is purely by fluke. Like the computer, however, the brain produces behaviours directly related to the way it processes information it receives. NLP has consequently developed an “owner’s manual” for the brain which describes in detail, how neuro-logical software works.”

Consider this exercise: Take “apple”, for instance. For each person reading “apple” there will be a million immediate mental pictures formed, from Biblical imagery to a personal experience involving or relating to an apple. With each mental image, there will be an emotional response - if the image was all about Eve, guilt can surface, if it was recalling a healthy, juicy snack, the emotion could be uplifting, if you associate apples with being caught stealing from a farmerís orchard as a child, fear could arise. Some emotional responses are obvious but many more are locked deep in the unconscious mind. And given the number of images the brain is battered by each hour of the day, thatís a lot of emotion to process. Little wonder then that one is often, for no apparent reason, left immobilised by overload and ultimately unable to achieve any level of excellence be it in business, in a relationship, or in regard to personal aspirations. Min McLoughlin explains further:

“Do not think of a green giraffe! Now what did you just think of? So, do you usually think about what you want in life (health, fitness, successful career, loving relationships, financial security), or do you think about your life in terms of what you DON’T want? Remember the giraffe? You see, we get what we think about - and we think faster than we realise. And there are more cells in the human body than there are stars in five galaxies and every cell is affected by what we think.

As humans we live in a five sensory world and take in all information through these five senses. If we absorbed everything that comes to us at 3-million bits of information a second, we’d fry our circuits. To deal with this we filter the information. Some of our filters are our perceptions of time and space energy and matter, the language we use and our understanding of words and meanings, our memories, the way we go about making decisions, the patterns we look for when selecting information, our values and beliefs and our overall attitude. And we delete, distort and generalise according to our filters. We then take what has gone through and make a picture of it with sounds and feelings, tastes and smells. The next thing that happens instantaneously is that we react to that image with corresponding state emotional behaviour.

So now that we have an understanding of how we store information and possibly an inkling of knowledge as to why we react to things the way we do, why go further? Says Kruger:

“The challenge occurs when things are not going so well - stress, anger, being sabotaged by fellow workers, workload. These are the times when you need some additional or different thought patterns that will support your spirit and enable you to win in these situations. When things go bad you can either see it as a catastrophe, subject yourself to a painful experience and be left feeling helpless; or you can see the situation as serious but not deadly. You can recognise that things are not as you expected but see the situation too as lessons that need to be learned. The pessimist will see failure; the optimist will see that although lessons can be painful, there is no failure, only feedback. Of my study of peak performers, all peak performers are optimists and rigorously protect themselves from negative thought.

Kruger speaks of “thought viruses” which act as frames of reference in how we react to information. How we choose to store information, what colour and emotion we give it, affects our reality and determines how flexible we are to alternative ways of perceiving information - and all this determines what kind of choices we make, how we can limit ourselves, or how we can remove the blockages and free ourselves to grow.

According to Dilts, as human beings, we can never know reality, just perceptions of reality. We create neuro-linguistic maps of reality that determine our behaviour- and it is not the reality that limits us but rather our map.

“The people who are most effective are the ones who have a map of the world that allows them to perceive the greatest number of choices and perspectives. NLP is a way of enriching the choices that you have. Excellence comes from having many choices and wisdom comes from having multiple perspectives.”

We all have different ways of receiving and processing information. NLP calls these modalities.

So now you know what your preferred modality is, what does it mean and how is it useful?

As human beings we take in all information through our five senses: sight, hearing, feeling, smell and taste. Of the 2.3 million bits of information that are bombarding our system at any given moment, we consciously select 7+-2 bits. Unconsciously we select even more and we select this information according to our unique filters.

Now, whether we are receiving and processing this information consciously or unconsciously, we are still using our senses and in NLP these are called modalities.Each of us has a preferred modality i.e. a preferred way of representing and receiving information.

Some people think in pictures (visual); others in sounds (auditory); some people go for how something feels (kinesthetic) and some people even process information in term of smells (olfactory) or tastes (gustatory).Finally there is the modality called Auditory Digital. You could say that this modality incorporates anything outside of the above five. However, it is more than that, being a distinct approach to information that searches for logical, linear meaning.

In NLP the belief is that the descriptions that we use to describe what’s going on in our heads are not metaphors but an accurate statement of our experience.If people “don’t see it” they don’t “see” it: they’ve been unable to make a picture based on the amount or type of information you’ve given them. If something “doesn’t sound right” there’s something in your tone of voice or the way you’re presenting the information that makes it impossible for them to process the information. If it “doesn’t feel right” you haven’t said the kinds of things that will enable the person to have the kind of feeling inside that let’s them know they’re got it. If it “doesn’t make sense” they’re telling your you haven’t given them enough logical, reasonable, digital information about what it is they’re wanting to understand.

Find out how we SEE, TUNE INTO, FEEL ABOUT and MAKE SENSE OF OUR WORLD.

SEE - VISUAL

Uses words like see, picture, sight, looks, view, overview, focus, clear, hazy, vision, twinkle and phrases like an eyeful, it appears to me, take a look at, beyond a shadow of a doubt, dim view of things, get a perspective on, mind’s eye, rose tinted glasses, tunnel vision, big picture thinking.

Visual people look at the world through visual images and understand by making pictures of the meaning. They are often gazing over your head or off to one side; this is because they are literally looking at the pictures or movies they are creating while you are speaking.

Looks are very important to visual people. When dealing with them, remember the old saying: “a picture’s worth a thousand words”. These are the people who really do form first impressions- which last for ever! - at first sight.

In a sales situation (and we are all selling something most of the time, be it selling our children on the idea of tidying their rooms or our significant others on the idea of going out for dinner) you want to give these people something to look at. This can be quite literal (show them the product, give them glossy, technicolor brochures) or can be a visual description of the benefits they will get from doing whatever it is.

To other visual people it will come as no surprise that there are people who can walk into a car showroom and buy “that car there!”. It looks right to them. They can see themselves driving it. The sound of the engine, the feel of the road handling and the specs and safety features are secondary - if they play a part at all.

HEAR - AUDITORY

Auditory people use words like sound, hear, discuss, interview, listen, loud, remark, rumor, say, speechless, tune in and phrases like clear as a bell, sounds like, tune into, bells ringing, keynote speaker, the power of speech, purrs like a kitten, to tell you the truth, word for word.

Auditory people listen carefully to what people have to say and accept it if it sounds right. They remember events and experiences by the songs they were listening to at the time, or the tone of voice the person used. Often they will tilt their heads in order to line their ear up to receive the sound most clearly (maybe they’re not looking at you, but they are pointing their ear towards you!).

These are the people who happily spend hours on the phone. And if they want to check you out, they’ll phone their friends and get their feedback. They are probably the people who invented the phrase “what isn’t said is just as important as what is said”.

To auditory people there are cars that just call to them, that purr or growl or roar. The quality of the sound system will be an added bonus! The colour and line of the car, the feel of the road handling and the specs and safety features are secondary - if they play a part at all.

FEEL - KINESTHETIC

Uses words like concrete, emotional, sensitive, firm, flow, feels, touch, heavy, burdensome, hard, weighty, pressure, grasp, lukewarm, foundation, stress, structure, demonstrate and phrases like boils down to, get a load of this, heated argument, keep your shirt on, get a handle on, pull some strings and start from scratch..

Kinesthetic people like to get a feel for things and people. They need to feel the garment, squeeze the melon, brush away dust and pet hairs, picks things up and play with them. They need to be doing. And they process information slower than the visual and auditory people, often looking down while you are presenting- they are literally getting a feel for what it is you are presenting.

Kinesthetic people need to meet you in person. Talking over the phone doesn’t do it for them, looking through the contract doesn’t do it for them, they need to meet you, shake your hand and get a feel for who you are and what you can do for them.

When it comes to car shopping, they need to test drive the vehicle, they’ll run their hand over the body work and they’ll get a gut feeling that this is the car for them. To heck with what it looks like, sounds like or what the spec. says.

LOGIC - AUDITORY DIGITAL

Uses words like logic, common sense, reason, system, understand, think, analyze, know, learn and phrases like due diligence, I’ll consider the idea, I’ll take it under advisement, to sum up, to make sense of.

Auditory Digital people need to understand why something is important; instructions have to make sense, everything must be ordered and logical. They not only enjoy but need printed details and flow charts.

When you are presenting information to them, they will often take notes and will hone in on the details. For them the specs. of the car are vital and they will expect and probably have a degree of technical know-how. They can appear dispassionate and calculating and that’s exactly what they are, in the most positive sense!

Min is a Master Trainer of Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Now…what did you just think of?
By the same principle many of us do not think about what we want in life (health and fitness, a successful career, loving relationships, financial security), rather we think about our life in terms of what we don’t want, (not wanting to be sick anymore, the problems at work, not wanting to be in abusive relationships, not being broke all the time).

You see, we get what we think about. And we think faster than we realise. And there are more cells in the human body than there are stars in five galaxies. And every cell is affected by what we think. Makes you think, doesn’t it?

So, what is NEURO LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING (NLP)?

NLP teaches you HOW you do what you do: HOW you take in the information from the world around you; WHAT you do with that information inside your head; and HOW what you do results in states such as happiness or depression, a body that is healthy or dis-eased and behavior that supports you in getting what you think about (which is not necessarily what you think you want).

The Neuro part of NLP refers to our neurological system and the way we use our 5 senses to translate our experience into thought processes, both conscious and unconscious. It highlights the way in which everything is part of the same whole - literally, as we speak, so we feel and we act.

Linguistic refers to how we both create and reveal to ourselves and others our unique model of the world, the way we think about it, and the way we experience it.

Programming refers to the processes and strategies - the specific steps we go through - to achieve the effects we get. There is sequence of thoughts and behaviors that results in our experience.

A complicated name for a simple process?

The founders of the system were John Grinder, a Professor of Linguistics, and Richard Bandler, a mathematician and computer programmer with a keen interest in the behavioral sciences, who met at the University of California, Santa Cruz in the early 1970s. They collaborated in studying and exploring how the mind works. And when they put all their expertise and experience together and asked themselves “What shall we call this body of work ?”, the answer came straight from their particular disciplines: Neuro Linguistic Programming.

How does it work?

As human beings we live in a five sensory world. We take in all information through our five senses. Now if we absorbed everything that comes to us at the rate of 3 million bits of information per second, we’d fry our circuits. So to deal with it - to make the pieces of information into small enough chunks to deal with - we filter the information.

Some of the filters are our perceptions of time and space, energy and matter, the language we use and our understanding of words and meanings; our memories; the unique way we go about making decisions; the patterns we look for when selecting information; our values and beliefs and our overall attitude. And we delete, distort and generalise information according to our unique filters.

Once we have passed incoming information through all these filters, we take what has got through and we make it an internal representation of it. This internal representation is in the form of a sensory perception: a picture with sounds, feelings, tastes and smells. The next thing that happens (instantaneously) is that we react to the internal representation and enter a corresponding state.

What is a state?

Being happy is a state; so is depression. Being “fired up” is a state, so is tiredness or lethargy. Many people are familiar with the expression “It’s a state of mind” but what’s really interesting about the state is that it leads us to choose corresponding behaviour.

The “fight or flight” syndrome is the best known example of this. There’s the caveman walking along the path and out jumps a saber-toothed tiger. The caveman’s body immediately reacts: the arousal system kicks-in, there’s a surge of adrenaline into the system, the breathing rate goes up and more oxygen enters the lungs, the heart pumps the blood stronger and faster through the system and simultaneously the blood drains away from the extremities, not only so that it can be used more effectively internally but so that if the caveman decides to fight, he won’t bleed so much should he be cut. Now his body is ready for his behaviour, running or fighting.
In a nutshell then, we have a process which starts with information and ends with behaviour and physical manifestation.

The working model

NLP both stems from and is an enormous and well-documented field of study. It draws from and incorporates work from the disciplines of semantics, linguistics, transformational grammer, cybernetics, anthropology, gestalt therapy, family therapy, behaviorism, hypnosis and quantum physics.

Studying NLP is like starting a journey - a journey into consciousness. It looks not for right or wrong choices, but for the reason (positive intention) for the choice. It looks for the patterns and draws into conversation the parts involved in creating our experience. It reveals that “the map is not the territory”, our memories and woes are perceptions and we can take up a position meta to them so that we can get the learning and let go of the emotion.

The NLP journey is about increasing awareness … increasing awareness of the information that is available to us and the realization that we can choose how we deal with that information. We begin to see that different choices will get different results. As our awareness increases, so we become more resourceful. By realizing that we have more resources available to us than we thought, and by using more of our innate capability, we gain greater flexibility. And so we grow.

In the end, NLP is about usefulness and results. By understanding the processes that we all use, we can find out exactly what it is that successful people do - and do it ourselves.

As a premier communication tool, NLP skills will enhance all areas of your life:  business, personal and community.
Whether you want to improve the quality of your relationships, increase your bottom-line, utilize the mind and body for self-healing or just realize that you are in control of your experience of life, NLP will give you a range of tools and techniques for accomplishing these outcomes.

For some people, just increasing their awareness, flexibility and resourcefulness in dealing with life and work is enough.  Others want to take those skills and use them in specific ways and environments.  In Europe and America, having the title NLP Practitioner or NLP Master Practitioner on one’s CV has become an essential sales, management and leadership statement.  In the fields of training, presenting and facilitating, NLP gives you the difference that makes the difference in excellence of both presentation and uptake of information by your audience.  In the field of coaching, the title NLP Coach indicates that you have specific model of coaching that can operate as a stand-alone model, or be combined with other models you might already be using.  And if you are in the field of therapy and counseling, NLP will give you the ability to get results in a fraction of the time required by more traditional approaches.

Min is looking for a Master Practitioner, based in Cape Town, who can help her with a modelling project. She would prefer face to face. She wants to get the model of how she did a specific thing successfully in the past, so that she can use and improve that model to do something similar NOW.

Hi everyone, I’ve just started seeing clients after having done Prac and Hypno/Energy Resourcing. Would anyone like to share their experiences? I found it exhilarating and quite daunting. It was hard to not respond to the things the client was saying in the same way as I would normally respond to friends. Mostly, I just kept quiet! Looking forward to our first “real” session. Any advice?

It was not really complicated.

Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, stood up last Sept. 18 and gave a talk to about 400 students, faculty and friends about some life lessons he’d learned. He was 47, he was in the early stages of pancreatic cancer, and he thought that an amiable presentation to his school — with the notion that his young children might value a videotape of the speech later on — might be a good idea.

He was right. Well, except for the part where he said that a computer learning program named “Alice” would be his legacy. He was wrong about that.

Pausch died Friday at his home in Chesapeake, Va., the co-author of the No. 1 best seller “The Last Lecture” and star of an Internet video sensation, that of his speech. More than 6 million people have viewed highlights or the entirety of the 76-minute talk, and Hyperion has 2.8 million copies of the book in print. It’s being translated into more than a dozen languages. He was eulogized across the land.

It seems safe to say that will be the professor’s legacy.

There was no $6.7 million book deal the day he gave the speech, and no promise of any sort of glory. There was just a bright, personable guy with a lot of energy, a terminal disease, and something he wanted to say.

He was witty and earnest and did not blink in the face of his demise. He wore tan slacks, a knit shirt and a mop-top haircut, and he had goofy props.

He gave the impression of a guy who would go out on his deathbed like Oscar Wilde. Shortly before he died, it is said, Wilde looked around his room and said: “My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.”

It’s tough to beat that, but Randy Pausch did just fine. “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you,” he said.
“If you have any herbal supplements or remedies, please stay away from me,” he said.

“I’m dying, and I’m having fun,” he said.
He said he wasn’t going to talk about things that were the most important — his wife, Jai, and children, Logan, Chloe and Dylan — but he would talk about making your childhood dreams come true. That was the surface topic — stuff about how he wanted to be in zero gravity, play in the National Football League, write an article for the World Book Encyclopedia.

The underlying lesson, he said, was that if you live your life the right way, the dreams take care of themselves. Good conduct consisted of being earnest, honest, working hard and realizing that brick walls in life are only there to separate those who really want to do something from those who just say they want to.

Do all that and “the dreams come to you,” he said.

This is not rocket science. The display of sincere emotion is not terribly complicated, and it is always moving to other human beings. It is surprisingly easy to recognize. This can be learned by watching people tell you a story in a language that you don’t understand. You’ll realize, before you get the translation, whether you believe what they are saying, and whether you care.

Sincerity translates, in other words, on a far more primal level than language. This, Randy Pausch understood. And on the one day he could leave a scratch mark on the face of oblivion, he did so with simple, honest life lessons. That they were ultimately intended for his children after his death gave the talk its aura, and he was showman enough to intuit that.

The book was an afterthought.

Jeffrey Zaslow, a Wall Street Journal columnist, attended the speech and wrote a column about it. It was a huge hit on the Journal’s Web site, which led to television appearances for Pausch and to much publishing buzz.

Pausch was unfazed.

“It took him five weeks to make up his mind he even wanted to do it,” Zaslow said Friday in a telephone interview.

The pair worked out the book during the course of 53 hour-long talks, conversing by phone while Pausch cycled around his neighborhood last winter to keep his strength up. Zaslow put in herculean hours and got the book out this spring.

And then the season turned to summer, and the tumors came and claimed him.

Death was, as he had made clear that magic evening on the stage, both near and inevitable. But he had made sure his legacy was set. He had done all that a father can — provide for his children and, at the end, let them know that all he really did in this life was to love them.

Life is not complicated and it is not fair, Randy Pausch might have said. It’s just hard sometimes.