NeuroLinguistic Programming
“It is the map, not the territory” Alfred Korzybski
Neuro: Neurological system – the way you use your senses to translate your experience into thought processes, both conscious and unconscious. It relates to your physiology as well as your mind (the bodymind). Linguistic: The way you use language to make sense of your experience, and how you communicate that to others. Your language patterns are an expression of who you are and how you think. Programming: Is the coding of experience. There is a sequence of behaviour and thinking patterns that result in your experience. Through awareness of these sequences you can code (and decode) the structure of your own and other people’s experience.
NLP enables you to:
- Accelerate your ability to learn
- Set compelling outcomes for yourself
- Build high quality relationships with people
- Heighten your sensitivity to yourself and others
- Develop your flexibility so you have more choices in life
- Influence others through rapport and a meeting of outcomes
NLP starts with yourself. It is only by learning to manage yourself that you can then influence others. Congruence in what you are, what you believe, and what you say and do is the recipe for personal success.
NLP was started by Richard Bandler and John Grinder who studied people whom they regarded to be excellent in the areas of communication and the management of change. They studied therapists such as Fritz Perls and Milton Erickson, and discovered how they used positive association, metaphors and ways of building rapport through behaviour and language. They studied the work of linguists Alfred Korzybski and Noam Chomsky, and many others, using the skills they learnt from the early work to facilitate the study of others. NLP is a generative process; so it is always changing and growing. Nowadays it is used for therapy, coaching, sales, organisational change, personal development – and of course, in market research.
The key principles of NLP
Inasmuch as it is possible to capture a fluid area of knowledge, the key principles of NLP can be summed up as ‘four pillars of wisdom’:
Rapport can be applied to both your relationship with yourself (the many conflicting parts of you) and with others. The greater the physical rapport you have with yourself, the greater your health and well-being. The greater your mental rapport, the more you feel at peace. Whatever your outcome is, being successful will involve relating to and influencing others.
Setting outcomes is about knowing what you want. Without knowing this you cannot even define success, let alone achieve this.
Sensory acuity gives you the feedback to know whether you are on course for your goals, as well as giving you the sensitivity to build rapport quickly and easily.
Behavioural flexibility is about having more choices of action. How are you going to get different results if you keep doing the same old things?
NLP as a Communication Model
This is another way to integrate the various aspects of NLP . External events experienced by us are subjected to our internal filters before they are stored. We can learn what filters a person is using by listening carefully to their language – what do they generalise, distort, leave out, and presuppose?
The events are stored as internal representations, which have visual, auditory and kinaesthetic components. (VAK) We can access these (by watching their eye movements) and ask people to describe them. We have an incredible ability to recreate our experience to ourselves (imagining licking a lemon will make you wince and salivate, remembering a great holiday will make you smile and your muscles relax).
Some people have a personal preference for visual processing, while others are more auditory or kinaesthetic. They language they use can tell you which they prefer. This has implications for creating rapport, deciding on joint outcomes (one can see it but the other needs to feel its right) and how people react to different elements in advertising.
This also gives us ways of accessing people’s internal states. (Each experience is broken down into a unique combination of V’s, A’s and K’s, and if it can be remembered it can be dialled up again like a telephone number.) We can get specific sensory information relating to various states by paying attention to these. Internal representations lead to overall states, which lead to behaviour, so changing the state can change behaviour.
In NLP terms, the meaning of a communication is the response you get. It doesn’t matter if you think you sent out the right message; if they are getting a different one, that is the message you sent.
You can find a useful NLP Profiler at New Oceans NLP. While it is interesting to read about NLP, there is a saying that NLP has to be “in the muscle” – you practice the steps and the exercises while learning to be able to use it fluently.
Another useful concept in NLP is that of different logical levels, as this helps us think more clearly about communication and behavioural change.
Please note this applies to brands and organisations as much as people.
This model can be represented as a pyramid or a series of concentric circles, both of which show that change at higher levels can influence lower levels. Change at lower levels may affect higher ones, but will not necessarily do so.
- Environment (where and when) is the place we are in and the people we are with. Shared circumstances build rapport.
- Behaviour (the what) includes specific, conscious, thoughts and actions.
- Capability (the how) is our level of skill and the strategies we have built up over the years
- Beliefs and Values (the why) direct our lives, acting both as permissions and prohibitions. If you believe you can’t acquire a new skill, you won’t.
- Identity (the who) contains statements that describe who you are as a person at your core. “I am….” It is your sense of yourself and your mission in life.
- Spirituality (purpose) is your connection to others and to that which is more than your identity, however you choose to think of it. On a practical level it is how you relate to the larger systems you are a part of.
An awareness of these allows you to understand what level a person is speaking at “I can’t do that” (behaviour) or, “I can’t do that” (capability) or even “I can’t do that” (identity). The consequences of confusing the levels can undermine both our ability to communicate and our and others’ self-esteem. Making a mistake is at the behaviour level, but being told “you are stupid”, is at the identity level, and can have damaging consequences if the idea becomes integrated into a person’s identity.
Aspects of NLP of Particular Interest to Planners and Researchers
Rapport skills are clearly of major interest, both in dealing with respondents and clients. They include non-verbal (whole body listening) and verbal skills, such as mirroring and matching respondents’ primary representational systems.
The process for setting outcomes can be applied not only to personal development but also to achieving clarity in the objectives for research and all sorts of teamwork.
The concept of perceptual positions is a useful analytical tool; it can increase empathy and aid in negotiations.
The ‘Meta-Model’ is a linguistic model which offers tools for precise information eliciting by paying attention to distortions, generalisations and deletions in language. Clean language provides a way of interviewing without any influence whatsover by the interviewer.
The Logical levels can be used as a model to analyse the communication and integrity of a brand and to compare brands.
Internal states and representational systems make the process of working with stimulus material much richer, and mean we can access feeling and need states in a more disciplined and thorough way.
Some organisations are using LAB (Language and Behaviour) profiles to analyse responses in research. It allows you to notice and understand how people get their motivation, how they process information and how they make decisions. It’s a set of about a dozen questions that you can feed into casual conversation or use as a formal survey for groups. As you become familiar with the questions and the kind of responses people give, you’ll find that you can hear and pick up the patterns people use. You can immediately use the influencing language that is just right for the situation.
One of the principles of NLP is that of Modelling – breaking down behaviour into its constituent parts in order to learn excellent practice. The AQR, with Tina Berry, instituted The Excellence Project – modelling of the styles, thinking and questioning patterns of excellent qualitative researchers. If you are interested in the outcomes of this, or some of the exercises that have been developed, please contact Joanna.
Further Reading
Alder, Harry, (2001) Mind to Mind Marketing, Kogan Page,London
Bandler, Richard, Grinder, John (1979) Frogs Into Princes, Eden Grove Editions
Knight, Sue (1995) NLP at Work, Nicholas Brealey Publishing
McPhee, Neil & Perry, Roger (2007) The Hidden Art of Interviewing People, John Wiley and Sons.
Laborde, Genie Z, (1987) Influencing with Integrity, Syntony Publishing
O’Connor, Joseph, McDermott, Ian, (1996) Principles of NLP, Thorsons
Rose Charvet, Shelle (1997) Words that Change Minds, Kendall/Hunt ,Iowa
