Here is a testimonial from a coach who has used NLP in her coaching business.
"NLP gave me with the foundational belief system and structure I needed to grow a bigger life and a successful coaching business. No other training has proven as valuable to me in terms of my personal/professional development".

All Change is good

For years, a friend of mine told me this and I would think, "Huh?" How could all change be good? It depends on how you look at CHANGE. Unfortunately, most people look and experience change as "loss."

Do this exercise. Go back through your personal history and look at all the major changes in your life. After the change, what happened next after everything settle down?

Change for me represents something "different" and something "better." Eventhough some changes have represented losses for me, the situations were always replaced by something better than what I had. If I were still in the same relationship I had when I was married I wouldn't be happy with the person I am with today, nor would I be the same unhappy person I was back then.

People make themselves miserable trying to hold on to what they have, when what they can get as a replacement would be 10x better.

The other thing to think about is that even though change may represent something that isn't useful, it at least let's us get clear about where our boundaries are and what we don't want. Change, then affords us the opportunity to develop a viable replacement. The replacement still represents a change but it is about moving towards something better rather than moving away from something that is painful. When we move away from something painful, we can never get what we want because moving away from something painful doesn't specify where we are going.

If we don't know exactly where we are going, we will end up somewhere - the same place as we were before.

Flexibility in thinking towards possibilites of what CAN happen is the hallmark of genius.

Biggest Misconception of Communication – Verbal vs. Nonverbal

Have you ever sat in a seminar or talk about communication and heard the speaker use the statistics about communication?:

· 7% are the words,

· 38% is the way the words are said (paraverbals) and

· 55% of the communication is non-verbal (body language)

WRONG!

In fact, just this week, after imparting the misconception with my Level 1 class, one of my students heard a talk where the speaker cited these statistics. When I hear them, I immediately become suspect of this person’s ability to teach communication.

Not so Simple

Let me set the record straight for all you speakers out there and listeners. These often yet misquoted, out-of-context figures came out of the work of Albert Mehrabian, specifically, “Silent Messages.” Beginning the in 1960’s Mehrabian, a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at UCLA, has been known for his pioneering work in the field of nonverbal communication (body language).

His experiments helped identify nonverbal and subtle ways in which a person conveys like-dislike, power and leadership, discomfort and insecurity, social attractiveness, or persuasiveness. Mehrabian's research provides the basis for the widely misquoted and often much over-simplified statistic for the effectiveness of spoken communications.

Feelings, Ambiguity and Conflict

It is important to understand the context of Mehrabian findings. At a minimum, the formula applies to communications of feelings and attitudes (like-dislike) , not simple communication, ambiguity or incongruence.

Here is the oversimplification of the true statistics:

· 7% of meaning in the words that are spoken.

· 38% of meaning is paralinguistic (the way that the words are said).

· 55% of meaning is in facial expression.

Mehrabian did not intend the statistic to be used or applied freely to all communications and meaning.

From Professors Mehrabian’s website:

“Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking

Please note that this and other equations regarding relative importance of verbal and nonverbal messages were derived from experiments dealing with communications of feelings and attitudes (i.e., like-dislike). Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable. Also see references 286 and 305 in Silent Messages -- these are the original sources of my findings”

For example, the spoken instruction,

"Fire! Evacuate the building!”

has 100% meaning in the words alone: “There is a fire and get out now!”

The tone and body language might additionally convey urgency in meaning. You don’t need a body language expert to give you the full meaning of the communication. You have it all in the words.

In autocratic environments, such as the armed forces, there is no need to discuss emotional attitudes and feelings. Mehrabian's theory and its implications are not especially applicable The soldier does as the officer dictates without any discussion.

The value of Mehrabian's theory relates to communications where emotional content is significant, and the need to understand it properly is great. Or where the words are ambiguous or where there is a conflict (incongruity) between the words a person uses and the non-verbals and tone (one of a class known as paraverbals). Example, saying “yes” and shaking your head “no.” People tend to rely more on the non-verbals to evaluate the emotional state of the person speaking when there is ambiguity or conflilct between the channels

This is applicable in management and business, where motivation and attitude have a crucial effect on outcomes.

Meaning and Spoken Communication.

When interpreting meaning as the listener or convey meaning as a speaker, the Mehrabian model is important but context of the communication needs to be considered. In Meharbian’s model, 93% of the meaning is inferred by nonverbal language but you cannot use it in as a general communication rule. Also take into consideration that the research involved only spoken communication.

In many instances, 100% of the words are used to convey meaning, such as in contracts, deeds and legal documents or signs, such as NO SMOKING or RESTROOMS. No attitude or emotional content is present. Books also rely on words for 100% of the communication.

So the next time you hear a speaker misquote these statistics, you can do a number of things.

1. Do nothing; just consider them ignorant and they didn’t do their homework. When I hear this from a speaker I know they heard or read about it without doing any research and thought it was impactful and decided to use it.

2. Mention to them privately that they might want to check out Mehrabian’s studies before using the statistics again. Or send them to my blog off my website.

3. Challenge them in front of their audience. Make them look foolish.

I suggest using number 2. You’ll be doing them a favor.

The Lies about how to tell if a person is lying to you

This is a second of a series of articles on misconceptions about “reading” people.

I hear this often on TV shows and from what I understand, it is generally taught to policemen. What I hear is that if a person looks up to right, they are lying. This is another myth (see November’s blog on Body Language) that originated from NLP and was taken out of context and taught wholesale to people without having the entire understanding of what they were saying.

I think what happens (I’m only guessing) that someone takes a class or read something and they extract information out the class to teach to others. This information is usually something they find relevant in their own lives or it makes sense to them. It doesn’t have anything to do with truth. In the past, I have been guilty of the same thing. Early on in my NLP career, I became a victim to this type of information extraction so that I could impress audiences or build my expertise and authority. Today, knowing what I know about speakers and trainers in general, I want to check out any information before imparting it to others. Disseminating bad information will do more harm to ones’ credibility than good. You never know who is in the audience.

NLP was originally developed to help people model excellence in human communication, learning and behavior. It helped us understand how people operated as systems. Early on in NLP, eye patterns (or eye cues) were taught to people as part of understanding internal computation (the sequence of patterning, Strategy, a person uses to do things or think, like how they make decisions). Strategies are programs that run in the mind to do everything we do. Discerning the Internal Computation was part of strategy elicitation. Eye patterns were taught to therapists to so that they would pay attention to the internal processing of the client and/or match that processing to develop rapport. NLP was also developed as a MODEL, not a theory. Models are about what works, not necessarily what is true. Theories tend to espouse truths, even though they are only theories.

When eyes go up and to the left, a person was accessing remembered information (edipic) and when eyes go up and to the right, a person was accessing constructed information. Somehow, over the years “constructed information” meant a person was making it up and therefore lying. BUT many right handed, normally organized people construct out of recall. The images are extracted out of a remembered memory. In FROGS INTO PRINCES by Richard Bandler and John Grinder (page 21), you’ll find that when Bandler and Grinder asked a number of the same questions to various participants, they go similar but not entirely the same eye movements. Some people would do one thing and another would do something else. To enhance rapport and understanding, a person would then match the words with the eye movements: visual eye movements with visual “see” predicate words and phrases. In fact, on a biochemical level, all memories are 'constructed. (1) The Psychobiology of Mind-Body Healing, Ernest Lawrence Rossi, 1986, W.W. Norton & Company, page 69. How 'constructed' a memory has to be to trigger that eye-accessing pattern isn't clear.

Then somewhere someone got the idea that if you asked a person a question and they got the answer out of visual construct that meant that they were lying. NO, NO, NO. it means nothing of the kind. The whole idea of NLP was to get people to stop generalizing about people. In fact, as I recall, someone close to Richard Bandler once stated that they were sorry that they ever taught that information to people because it was so distorted and misused.

Stever Robbins wrote a great article about NLP and Lying. He said that just because you ask a question to elicit certain eye cues doesn’t mean you are going to get them. He says, As part of the experiment, I asked, "How many chairs do you have in your living room?" expecting them to access visual information. They would have a KINESTHETIC eye-accessing cue. That counted as a non-correlation. During the debrief, the subject said, "Remember when you asked about the chairs? I suddenly remembered how wonderful it felt when my mother rocked me to sleep in those chairs." (He went on about the wonderful FEELING for a few more seconds.) Just because I wanted him to access certain information didn't mean he did. In police interrogation, I can imagine anyone--innocent or not--worrying about how their answers will be taken. If they worry by constructing scenarios in their mind, that could produce a 'constructed' accessing cue.”Accessing eye cues may also be a reference to where information is stored spatially in submodalities. Therefore, accessing memories is only the first step in using the information.

A better approach to lie detection is to learn to notice unconscious physiological responses: pupil dilation, pore size, skin flush, muscle tone changes, breathing, etc. Calibrate carefully. Ask lots of questions that you know the answers to, until you are sure you can tell what combinations of nonverbal responses correspond to truth. If they happen to lie to one of your questions and you know they're lying, you'll also have the chance to calibrate a lie. Good poker players do this when they look for a "tell" in the other players. Often times a person’s voice pitch and tone will change when they are not telling the truth or there will be voice stress. Even that isn’t accurate.

Also, unless you know someone REALLY, REALLY well, the chances that you can tell they are lying are small. The bottom line on lie detection is that you simply can't tell from any of the simply NLP observations whether or not someone's lying. You may have said something or asked a question which triggered the person thinking about a childhood trauma or a memory of a heated conversation. Or the eye movement may have had nothing whatsoever to do with your words. A person could have had an unrelated sudden thought.

Robbins says, Sometimes if I think someone's lying, I'll simply re-ask the question a couple dozen times in a couple dozen different ways. Or I'll ask, "Really? Are you sure?" Or I'll ask for details. Those aren't NLP By the way, if you really thought that they were lying with that eye movement, your suspicions may have caused you to have a pronounced nonverbal reaction. Hopefully, they interpreted that correctly.

Stever's (and Susan’s) sage advice: don't hang around with people you think lie to you. It makes life much easier.

DEBUNKING THE MYTHS ABOUT BODY LANGUAGE

Well, I’ve had enough!


The Body Language Experts are coming out of the woodwork. They are blogging; they are on TV, they are giving talks. And there are still more people out there who are pretending to be body language experts. There is no end to the misinformation about body language in the media these days. So much so that certain myths have now become so widely spread that regardless of what a particular movement means, it is now accepted by the general public as truth even though it isn’t.


So I am setting the record straight at least for my corner of the world. If you are so inclined you can send this on to some of your wayward brethren who have been caught in the mythical fray. I’ll give you the most effective way to handle any body language. See below on how to handle any body language.


I got started on this one morning when one of my master practitioners sent me a link to some coach’s blog (is a coach necessarily a body language expert?). Most of them work over the phone. They don’t even get visual cues unless they have Skyp. In this person’s defense, her bringing up to awareness some of the inappropriate body language that can be used in interviews allows a person to become aware of their own body language.


So this woman, the coach says:

Leaning Back in Your Chair
When in an interview, it’s not a good idea to lean back in your chair. This gives the impression that you’re overly relaxed and disinterested in the job. It can also make you appear untidy. To remedy this, sit a little bit forward in your chair. This helps you present yourself as alert and eager to answer any questions thrown your way.


Now I agree that leaning back in your chair during a job interview is probably not the best strategy for showing interest BUT leaning back in the chair could also mean that the person is thinking about what the speaker is saying (processing, if you will). It is a dissociation. It is a backing away from the conversation while processing. The person can also be disagreeing with the speaker. They’ve heard something that doesn’t resonate with one of their values or heard something they don’t like. They may be commenting (internal dialog) inside and comparing what is being said with their own beliefs. But I’ve never heard that a person is relaxed or disinterested.


Folding Your Arms
Did you know that folding your arms in any situation sends a message that you’re closing yourself off from the person you’re communicating with? This means, if you fold your arms in an interview, you’re sending the interviewer the message that you’re not inviting him or her in. In other words, you can appear to be an unfriendly person, which could potentially X you out of the job.


OH, PLEASE! NOT AGAIN!!!! This is one of the myths that have been so perpetuated by the media and so called experts that it is now accepted as fact. We fold our arms for dozens a reasons: we are cold, we listening to the speaker are a few. This myth is so wide spread that I actually uncross my arms on purpose when I am conversing with a person I don’t know because of their perception of what it means.


Crossing Your Legs
While crossing your legs during an interview seems to be a polite and professional gesture, some experts beg to differ. In fact, this action actually sends a message of complacency, which is not what you want to communicate to your interviewer. This is why it is advised that you instead plant both feet firmly on the floor. It demonstrates confidence in who you are.


Actually crossing your legs is an incongruency as is standing with the weight of the body on one leg. I agree that planting both feet on the floor is a better way of sitting because it is more balanced. Where this person got that it meant complacency, I don’t know. I have dozens of people who take training from me every month. If they are sitting crossed legged does it mean they are all complacent? For the kind of money they are paying and time they are investing, I don’t think any of them are complacent. Their hindend may be uncomfortable from the hotel chairs, but based on the skill level of the participants that come out of my trainings, I don’t think complacency is a word that I would use to describe any of them. Sitting balanced actually is not only beneficial for your body, it is also very good for your mind. It actually helps the thinking/learning process. Standing and sitting with the body weight evenly distributed on both legs helps the person with energy and accessing neurological information.

There are 6 billion people on the face of earth. There are countless cultures. And all of them (people) place meaning on everything thing that happens to them, their friends, family, city, country, world. With so many minds taking in so much information the chance that two people see or experience the same event exactly the same is almost impossible. If you have 10 eye witnesses to an accident, you will get 10 individual and different interpretations of what happened.


So take the fact that no two people experience the world alike and make their own meaning of experience and then add this to the fact that the meaning we place on experience drives our emotions, and then add the fact that emotions drive our behavior, of which our body language is derived. So is it accurate to say that when all human beings do something in their behavior (body language) that it all means the same thing? How can it? Everyone perceives the world differently so each person’s movements will have different, individual meaning. The meaning of the movement may change over time as the individual learns, grows, evolves or grows older.


Jules Collingwood, an NLP Trainer Assessor, says,
” As humans we can modify our gestures consciously, making voluntary movements as well as displaying unconscious breathing shifts, skin tone changes and micro-muscle movements. We use our bodies to convey interest or disinterest, to establish rapport with others or to stop them in their tracks. We learn cultural norms about appropriate body language for people of our gender, age and status in our daily lives and sometimes find our habitual presentations elicit markedly different responses in other parts of the world.


So what can body language teach us about other people? With sufficient exposure to another culture we can learn to recognize its members by their body language, the way they move and gesture, how close they stand to other people and how much eye contact they make and with whom. We can learn to recognize HOW the individual, whatever their origin, is thinking by watching their eye movements, breathing and posture as they interact. This will not tell us WHAT they are thinking. The subject matter of someone's thoughts remains private until they describe it.”


Until you know someone and can calibrate them through time, you don’t know when a particular person is passionate about something, bored, closed off, annoyed. They might be trying to take an insect off of their shirt or need to go to the bathroom. They may be angry but you are not necessarily the object of their wrath. Calibration is the act of observing a particular person and asking them for meaning which we can use for future reference. Just because the person does something that means _________ , doesn’t mean that everyone has the same meaning.


In NLP, making interpretations or assumptions about other people’s behavior or movements is called MIND READING. We may have some degree of accuracy when mind reading but if you miss read someone, you may have lost rapport with an important part of your future. If you use body language to calibrate someone you can use that information to form questions and calibrate for the future.


HOW TO HANDLE BODY LANGUAGE


The best way to handle body language is to look at the larger frame of what you want to accomplish. Establishing rapport by matching and pacing body language will help you succeed in accomplishing your communication outcome/goal. Making meaning about what they are doing will not. The latter seems such a waste of time. Take the fact that no communication takes place without rapport, matching and pacing any movement will help you establish a relationship of trust and comprehensive understanding.


If you are interviewing for a job, it is much preferred to match your interviewer. Your brain makes thousands of decisions every second about the person in front of you by making comparisons of similarity and differences. The more similar a person is to you or you are to a person, the more familiar you seem to them, the more comfortable you will be with each other. Respectfully aligned with another person is the most effective way to understand each other. People like people who are like themselves. But it isn’t even about liking; it is about UNDERSTANDING. YOU WILL LEARN MORE ABOUT A PERSON BY MATCHING THEIR BODY LANGUAGE THAN FIGURING OUT WHAT IT MEANS. Being conscious or unconscious (you do this anyway) about aligning with others is the key to communication success.

Stay tuned for Myths about Lying and the 7%-38%-55% Myth about what is important in communication.

It Doesn't Take a Big Miracle to Appreciate the Small Ones

The most recent book I’ve read is Miracle in the Andes. It was written by one of the survivors of an airplane crash in the early 1970’s. I’ve read a number of profound books in my life, another one being Left to Tell.

What struck me about this first-person account about these young rugby players’ survival in the Andes after a plane crash for 72 days, was how it demonstrated the POWER OF THE MIND and the importance in KEEPING OUR FOCUS ON OUR HIGHEST CRITERIA. Getting distracted by negative consequences drains our energy and pulls that energy away from what we need to be doing to have a better outcome.

The author, Nando Parrado, was unconscious for 3 days before he came to and discovered that the plane crashed and his mother and sister and many of his team mates were dead or dying. It was only the beginning of 72 days of 30 below-freezing temperatures, no winter clothing, no water, no food and no way out. After 72 days of impossible conditions, it took the author and another one of the survivors 10 days to walk 45 miles over 17,000-foot mountain peeks to find a shepherd to get help.

They improvised ways of making water, fashioned snow shoes out of plane insulation and a multitude of other somewhat ingenious and horrifying ways of surviving. They found out while trying to get the plane radio to work that the search for them had been called off. Nando, an ordinary young man wanting only to survive, led an expedition up the treacherous slopes of snow-capped mountains and across 45 miles of frozen wilderness to find help.

He stayed beside his sister until she finally gave up her life. When he was told after becoming conscious that his mother had died in the crash, the tears began to well up inside of him and he heard a voice say, “Don’t cry. Tears waste salt. You will need salt to survive.” Astonished by the calmness of the voice, he was then told of the others who had died. Wanting to sob again, he heard the voice, “Do Not Cry. They are all gone. They are all part of your past. Don’t waste your energy on things you can’t control. Look forward. Think clearly. You will survive.”

And he did. In the face of death, that could come at any moment. In the face of terrifying fear which he could not ignore, he lived 72 days and walked out of the Andes to live a rich and prosperous life: a life which he dreamed up in the Andes that included a loving wife and children, seeing his dad again, telling his dad that his sister did not die alone.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his landmark research and book, FLOW: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OPTIMAL EXPERIENCE, says, “one common attitude shared by individuals who survived severe physical ordeals (concentration camps) was the implicit belief that their destiny was in their hands. They did not doubt that their own resources would be sufficient to allow them to determine their fate. In that sense they could be called self-assured, yet at the same time, their egos seem curiously absent. They found a way to function in their environment harmoniously. This attitude occurs when a person no longer sees himself in opposition to the environment. He feels a part of whatever goes on around him, and tries to do his best within the system in which he must operate.”

While others in the crash were blaming God and a host of others for this terrible accident, Nando was finding ways to survive and think about his future. He imagined his father suffering in agony for his loss and Nando would feel rage and hear the past words of this father during his father’s own bitter crisis, “I decided I would not quit. I decided I would suffer a little longer.” Nando would vow silently, “ I will struggle. I will come home. I will not let the bond between us [he and his dad] be broken. I promise you, I will not die here. I will not die here!

After Nando and the rest of the survivors (16 out of 45) had returned home, his father told him, “I thought that all of you were dead. I knew I would never recover from the loss. It was as if my house burned down to the ground, and I had lost everything I owned, forever. And now, to have you back, it’s as if I have stumbled on something precious in the ashes. I feel I am reborn. My life can begin again. From now on, I will try not to feel sorry for what was taken from me, but to be happy for what was given back….The sun will come up tomorrow,” he told me, “and the day after that. Don’t let this be the most important thing that ever happens to you. Look forward. You will have a future. You will have a life.”

So my thoughts for this hot summer day as I think about my trip to Iowa are as follows:

1. Know what is important to you and how much you value it. People wonder why I call going to see my family a vacation. It is the one place I know people love me for who I am and not what I do. They don’t care what I do. I’m Aunt Sue to them. Now it’s Great Aunt Sue.
2. No matter what happens, there will be another day. Don’t let circumstances deter you from what is really important to you.
3. Stay focused on something greater than yourself that is positive. Everyone will have challenging, even devastating events in their lives. Our success will be based on how we clearly we focus on a better future.
4. Regardless of what is going on, find a way to function harmoniously in your environment. As Csikszentmihalyi says, this attitude occurs when a person no longer sees himself in opposition to the environment. He feels a part of everything going on around him.
5. Focus your attention off yourself and onto helping others. There is always someone who is in worse shape.
6. It’s not about getting rid of the fear. It is about using it to survive or focusing on something that is more important. Fear has value. It is information. Work on discovering new solutions and opportunities. Csikszentmyhalyi states, “Most of us become so rigidly fixed in the ruts carved out by genetic programming and social conditioning that we ignore the options for choosing any other course of action. We will never become aware of other possibilities unless we pay attention to what is happening around us and evaluate events on the basis of their direct impact on how we feel rather than evaluating them exclusively in terms of preconceived notions.” Don’t make your happiness depend on what will happen under a certain set of rules.
7. Be grateful for what you do have. In the movie, TRANS SIBERIAN, one of the characters kept saying, “Focus on the donut, not on the hole.”
8. Learn lessons easily. Avoid waiting for a crisis to get you to wake up. A crisis isn’t the first indication that something is going wrong. Pay attention to the feedback you are getting around you.
9. Appreciate the moment but remember the moment is part of an on-going process. Your life can change in an instant. But there will be more of it. Be strong and a source of strength for those around you.
10. Avoid letting negative consequences get in the way of your happiness. In Miracle in the Andes, there are photographs taken with a disposable camera someone had in their luggage. Despite the horrific conditions and the ever presence of death, the pictures showed smiling faces. No matter what is going on, we can all take a moment to smile.

And I thought my trip up Kilimanjaro was hard. No, this was hard!

Every thing You Do Counts

Over Memorial Day weekend, I thought a lot about the men and women who give up their regular lives to go and fight overseas. Some of them never come back. Some of them come back and have a troubled time readjusting to their normal life again. These are the ones I'm concerned with.

I have an extraordinary talent for helping people. It is the only way that I could do what I do for the last 20 years. There are many skills and processes in NLP that can help these young men and women reorient into society faster and smoother. One of the special processes of NLP is the Trauma Process which can also be used for phobias. In about 15 minutes, sometime less, I can help a person rid themselves of the effects of trauma.

I have worked with many people over the years whose lives were crippled by emotional and physical trauma that were healed. They went on to lead happy, well-adjusted lives. Policemen and civilians who have been shot or in car accidents, people whose spouse died or left them suddenly, people who have been in airplane crashes and survived, people with post traumatic stress disorder. Many people don't realize that PTSD can be triggered by long term domestic violence or emotional trauma or losing someone suddenly.

And then I thought, well, if I can do this so well, why not help our service men and woman who are having a tough time back in the States. I hear of so many of these young men and woman who have marriage problems, nightmares, etc. It seems to me to be unnecessary suffering.

So, I am offering to any current or recently past military service personnel my services and classes free of charge. I am in Dallas, TX. Sometimes I can work with them on the phone doing coaching.

If you know of a service person who needs help, please send them my way.

Thanks.