Part I
The Difference That Makes the Difference
In this part . . .
Welcome. The chapters in this part deliver the basics on understanding and using NLP in business. I introduce you to the NLP skills you need to engage with and influence others and increase your flexibility to get the results you want. I also show you how to set and achieve goals and apply the principles of NLP to overcome barriers to success at work.
Chapter 1
Achieving Business Excellence with NLP
In This Chapter
Getting familiar with NLP
Discovering NLP business benefits
Achieving more with NLP
Taking charge of your career
Influencing others
Building a career, getting an interesting job, and finding opportunities to progress are important to most people. After all, you spend a huge amount of time at work. You hope that your career brings personal development, fulfilment, and, of course, the means you need to live a comfortable life. Yet sometimes your working life falls short of your expectations and hopes.
Making a success of your working life and achieving your professional goals and dreams depends on more than your qualifications, experience, and job-related skills. These days, getting on at work relies on exceptional communication skills and the ability to flex and change continually. Understanding the principles and tools of neuro-linguistic programming, or NLP, can help you become an excellent influencer, as well as acquire the self-awareness and techniques to adapt and change to achieve your aspirations.
If youâre ready to take charge of your life at work â and to stop allowing your fortunes to be dictated by bosses, colleagues, employers, customers, or anyone else â then this book is a good place to start. Find out more about the value of NLP in business in this chapter, before moving on to discover dozens of ways to put its principles to use in the rest of the book.
Reprogramming the Mind for Success
Making change happen at work often seems difficult. Have you ever found that, no matter how much you try, youâre still frustrated in your efforts to make things better?
Maybe youâve been so determined in the past that you worked harder and harder, yet still didnât get what you wanted. This experience isnât so surprising, certainly if you subscribe to a core NLP premise, explored more in Chapter 3, that:
If you always do what youâve always done, youâll always get what youâve always got. So in order to get a different result, you probably have to make some changes and find alternatives to your tried-and-tested actions and responses to people, situations, and challenges. At the heart of NLP is the idea that if you continually seek new choices and try different things, you achieve what you want.
The fact that youâre reading this book suggests that you may well be ready to make some changes. Throughout the book I show you how to use NLP to discover the drivers of your thinking and behaviour. You can discover how to detect the patterns and habits that you hold unconsciously â and realise when these patterns and habits are very useful to you, as well as when they arenât.
Think of your brain as a bespoke computer, programmed to run you. As with any software program, you only notice the bit that comes up on the screen. The detailed and sophisticated program is running behind the scenes, out of your awareness. You may not realise that some of this software can be deleted, installed, or upgraded to get far more effective results. The same can be said of your unconscious mind. After you start paying some attention and observing how your mind is working, you have the choice to delete, upgrade, or install whichever bit of âthinking softwareâ you desire.
NLP offers you the keys to unlocking your own potential. Reprogramming your mind for success is in your hands. Removing previous limitations is inevitable. Your dreams become your goals, and theyâre goals you can achieve.
You canât change other people. All you can change is yourself and how you respond to other people. When people around you are ready to change, you can use many of the tools and approaches you discover in this book to coach and help them. Turn to Chapter 12 for more on coaching others. Defining NLP
One of the first challenges to face when discovering NLP is the name itself. Neuro-linguistic programming sure is a mouthful.
When you break the name down into its component parts, however, the relevance of each part becomes clearer:
Neuro relates to your neurological system: how you use your five senses both to experience the outside world and to create your internal world by remembering and imagining. Your conscious and unconscious thought processes activate your nervous system, which influences your physiology (breathing, posture, movements and so on), how you feel, and what you do and say.
Linguistic refers to the way people use language to make sense of their experiences, to talk to themselves, and to communicate with others. Everyone has distinct patterns in how they use language, and these patterns provide tremendous insights into peopleâs thinking.
Programming is just like computer programming, only relating to the human brain. A program â for a computer or in your brain â is a succession of steps designed to achieve a particular result. Your personal programs lead to the results you get and the impact you have on yourself and others.
Since its introduction in the 1970âs, NLP has been defined in many different ways. The following sections delve into what exactly NLP is â and isnât.
Studying and observing
Leaders in the field of NLP most commonly describe NLP as the study of the structure of subjective experience, which is a very obscure way of saying studying how individuals think and behave. Studying and obse...
