Communication Excellence

Using NLP to Supercharge Your Business Skills

Ian R McLaren

• Publisher: Crown House Publishing
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9781899836390
• eBook ISBN: 9781845904968
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This ten-lesson course will transform you into an excellent communicator. Providing invaluable training in key NLP-based methods, it will increase your ability to: manage; market; sell; influence; inspire; innovate. "... a wealth of good ideas..." Judith E. Pearson PhD, Psychotherapist and Certifi ed NLP Trainer/Practitioner

Day Three: Hearing Their Words

Let’s just remind ourselves of the purpose of this course. You want to improve your communicating, and you have set some outcomes for doing that. Keep those in mind, as we go on to see how we can match the thinking processes of the person we are talking to. Specifically, we are going to consider the words that they say.

Let’s start by previewing today’s topics.

• The Structure of Learning

Learning is a process that takes us from not knowing that we don’t know something, through awareness, to a point where we only realise that we know it if someone asks us.

• Congruence

Is the person you are talking to reinforcing what they are saying with their body language? Is she saying “yes” and shaking her head? Is he smiling or wincing when he says “thank you”? Signals of congruence can help you decide what is really going on.

• Verbal Predicates

Some of us see the world about us. Some people hear what is going on. Others need to feel what is right. There are different ways of accessing information, and our preferred channel shows up in the words we use to describe the world. If you talk to someone in their own language, using their verbal predicates, you stand the best chance of getting through to them.

• Clean Language

The questions we ask can lead to us getting a particular answer. To get information about another person we need to take care to use language patterns that avoid making assumptions.

• Presuppositions

Everything we say is incomplete. The listener is forced to read between the lines in order to make sense of what we are saying. Your completion of the sense may not be the same as mine. If I say, “She hit me”, I might mean that Susan dealt me another card, while you might think that my mother slapped me. Presuppositions need to be tested in order to avoid error. That last sentence is a presupposition.

The Structure of Learning

I hope that you have found some time since the last seminar to practise some of the techniques we learned. One resource that is always scarce is time: time to think about the outcomes as well as achieve them. Sir John, as Chairman of Whizzitts, you must be as busy as anybody is?

“I am, but I’m also fairly organised. My secretary has orders to leave a gap in my diary every day so that I have some time for myself – to get my thoughts in order. I have found the self-pacing exercise a useful way of starting that daily period of reflection. I have also started noticing people more – what exactly they are doing, and what it might mean to me.”

After talking to some of you over coffee, I think that’s quite a common reaction. And it seems that you are beginning to match people you are speaking to without being too self-conscious about it. In fact, it is becoming automatic.

Let’s have a story about how I learned to drive. Before we learn a skill, we don’t know the details of what we can’t do. I had seen my parents driving, so I knew that it involved wiggling a wheel and pushing and pulling at various pedals, switches and levers. I assumed that because other people can drive, all I had to do was get in the car and speed away. This is called unconscious incompetence.

Once I was behind the wheel, I started to learn a little and panic a lot. Nothing seemed to work properly. The engine kept stalling. The car would leap about on the road. Traffic came from nowhere. There was so much to remember – push down the clutch before trying to change gear. I thought that I would never put it all together. This is the longest stage in any learning – at least, it seems so at the time. It got worse, because the more I learned, the more aware I became of the range of things that I could not do. This is the stage of conscious incompetence.

Then, gradually, I began to realise that I could do some of the techniques. As long as I talked myself through it – mirror, signal, engage first gear, handbrake off, clutch out and accelerate away – I could start moving the car without a kangaroo hop. This isn’t an easy phase, and there were plenty of opportunities for me to show a lack of skill. Still, eventually I started getting some of the rewards, like a driving licence. This degree of learning is called conscious competence.

“Once I was behind the wheel, I started to learn a little and panic a lot.”

As I continued to practise, the skills become automatic, and I no longer had to think about how to turn the wheel or change gear. I could drive and listen to the radio, or talk to my passengers. I would arrive at my destination without being aware of how many times I had changed gear or turned on the indicators. I had become unconsciously competent. That isn’t quite the final stage, however. It may be important to know what we are doing or have just done. We can become aware of competence. As a result of continued practice we can develop further skills. Askilled police driver can drive and talk through what he is seeing and doing – my driving isn’t that skilled. I can, however, set myself to remember the important points of how everyone was speaking in a meeting where I also have to consciously record the content of what they are saying.

Remember that you can keep practising until you are unconsciously competent in these techniques for communicating. Then you can use them without thinking about it, unless you need to.

Congruence

One thing that came up in conversation this morning was that some of you noticed that what you were calibrating from people’s expressions didn’t always match their words. Last week we were calibrating for lying, and noticed changes in expression, posture, gestures and breathing. This is just a special case of incongruity, where body language and words do not match. We can find incongruity happening simultaneously. You might say, “Yes, dear”, and shake your head at the same time. Oh, yes, that seems to be quite a common experience. We can also find it happening sequentially – someone says, “Of course I’d like to do that”, and then grimaces. I can see that some of you have experience of that one as well. You can also be incongruous in matching someone else. The person expects a particular response and gets something different, even though you are agreeing.

We have worked on congruous behaviours – matching – and now we want to practise congruity in language.

We all use words, every day, to communicate with our work colleagues, customers, family or friends. Just think of some occasions where you have failed to get the result you wanted by using the wrong words, or where you could have got a better result if the words had been more suited to the person you were talking to. Maybe you have offended someone, or driven that person away. Someone may have changed the subject from the one you wanted to talk about. Or if the other person was obliged to stay with you, he or she might have looked bored, or not taken in what you were saying.

Exercise 3.1: Using the Right Words

Get out a piece of paper and write down at least...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Day One: Understanding Yourself
• Day Two: Making Their Moves
• Day Three: Hearing Their Words
• Day Four: Valuing Their Emotions
• Day Five: Patterns of Behaviour
• Day Six: Structures of Language
• Day Seven: Sets of Values
• Day Eight: Directing Behaviour
• Day Nine: Imparting Information
• Day Ten: Boosting Feelings
• Annotated Bibliography
• Copyright