.KEYWORD nlp
.FLYINGHEAD REINVENT YOURSELF
.TITLE Thinking outside the box with NLP
.OTHER
.SUMMARY Have you ever wanted to find tools that went beyond normal management consulting techniques, tools that could help you manage your mental, emotional, and physical states of wellbeing, help you communicate more effectively, be a better salesperson, and be better able to establish rapport with those around you? Read this article, you just might find what you’re looking for.
.AUTHOR David Gewirtz
More than 66% of all visits to primary care physicians are for stress-related problems. The American Institute of Stress, a non-profit stress research clearinghouse reports that job stress costs American industry more than $150 billion yearly in absenteeism, lost productivity, medical coverage, and accidents. The National Institute of Occupational Safety & Health considers stress to be one of the top ten leading workplace hazards to health.
And that was before the events of September 11, 2001.
It was at that time, ZATZ co-founder Denise Amrich and I decided we had to start thinking outside the box. We decided to look for tools that would help us be more effective at work while at the same time, manage our state of mind.
I know something about operating a business in recession. Actually, I know quite a lot. Back in the 90s, I wrote a book called The Flexible Enterprise: How to Reinvent Your Company, Unlock Your Strengths, and Prosper in a Changing World. Most of the book talked about traditional business operations and how to manage change in those operations. Of the 262 pages in the book, I devoted a scant six or seven to social and psychological issues. Of course, back in the 90s, no one had flown a plane into the Pentagon or the World Trade Center.
Denise and I decided we needed to find tools that went beyond normal management consulting techniques. We needed to find tools that could help us manage our mental, emotional, and physical states of wellbeing, help us communicate more effectively, be better sales people, and be better able to establish rapport with those around us.
.H1 About NLP
Since the 1980s, I’ve been aware of a discipline called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (or NLP, for short). I’ll tell you more about what NLP is later. But first, let me tell you about the origins of the practice. I know this stuff doesn’t really appear to be Palm-related, but it’s important and I ask you to read along, because it could prove as valuable to you as it has to my business.
NLP is a curious beast. Many scientific disciplines are built "theory down." This means that the discipline starts with a set of theories and the practice is derived from the theory. NLP is empirical, it seems to have started with various observations and built up into unifying theories.
Back in 1975, two scientists observed that certain communicators and therapists (including hypnotherapist Milton Erickson, gestalt therapist Fritz Perls, and family therapist Virginia Satir) had unusually effective results from their practices. These two scientists, Richard Bandler and John Grinder, studied these master communicators, looking for the patterns that made these people so effective. NLP, which has evolved considerably since 1975, is the result of these studies.
Today, NLP is widely used in business to improve management, sales and achievement, boost performance, and increase interpersonal skills. It’s been used in education to better understand learning styles, develop rapport with students and parents and to aid in motivation. The "guru industry" has also latched onto NLP and uses the practice as a set of tools for personal development.
So what exactly is NLP? The name gives only the barest of clues, in my opinion. If you combine the words that make up the name Neuro-Linguistic Programming, you get "neuro," for mind, "linguistic," for language, and "programming." Reassembled, you get something like the "programming the language of the mind."
The easiest way to think of NLP is as a discipline that helps you refine how your mind goes about thinking about things. It takes some of its practice from hypnosis, some from psychology, some from therapy, and combines it all together into a relatively understandable discipline. NLP has been used in practices from family therapy to cancer treatment to peak performance in business. Because NLP has techniques that would help increase rapport and improve communication, Denise and I decided it merited further investigation.
.H1 The skeptic’s view
I’m a natural skeptic. I’ve never been a fan of the fru-fru stuff, the fluffy, new-age things that are supposed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy. As you might imagine, I was a bit skeptical about NLP. At first, it seemed like something you’d buy from a late-night informercial. Interestingly, it turns out, it is.
Tony Robbins, arguably one of the gurus of the infomercial, appears to have based much of his program on the basic NLP research. He rebuilt it for the masses, added some things, and renamed it. Reports are that people find value from Robbins material, but there’s also a lot he left out.
I, of course, was curious. I needed to know if this NLP thing was for real. So I did a little research. I found three reports particularly interesting.
The first was from Psychology Today. They wrote, "NLP cannot be dismissed as just another hustle. Its theoretical underpinnings represent an ambitious attempt to codify and synthesize the insights of linguistics, body language, and the study of communication systems." I’ve read a number of things in Psychology Today and they seem pretty credible.
But, what I wanted to find out was whether there was a chance that NLP could help us at work. Strangely, I found the clue in a magazine called Real Estate Today. According to the magazine, "Real estate brokers and salespeople use Neuro-Linguistics to enhance their communication skills and provide them with more choices when working in a difficult situation. It shows how we make sense of the world around us and communicate."
Finally, I found a reference that was pretty wild. It didn’t particularly apply to my needs as a manager, but definitely got me thinking. Dr Richard Bolstad and Margot Hamblett have done research on using NLP techniques to…get this…heal cancer. According to their research, cancer can be healed using "mind-body processes." They conducted a research study based on over 300,000 people, which shows a mind-boggling 95% effectiveness.
According to Bolstad and Hamblett, supporting the body’s immune system assists in the healing of cancer. They consider this to be the core of what NLP contributes to cancer treatment. Interestingly, very little advice is given by many oncologists (cancer specialists) about how to assist the immune system.
Supporting the mind-body theory of cancer treatment is analysis by Dr. Brendan O’Regan, a neurochemist who has collected a database of 3,500 medically documented cases of spontaneous remission of cancer. Dr. Charles Weinstock leads the New York Psychosomatic Study group, and has commented on these cases: "Within a short period before the remission, ranging from days to a few months, there was an important change, such as a marriage, an ordination, the birth of a grandchild, or removal of a relationship that was unwanted. There was a psychosocial rehabilitation of one sort or another, and then the cancer was healed."
Pretty wacky stuff, eh? Yet there was enough supporting information that told me I wanted us to learn more. And we did.
.H1 Accelerated NLP Practitioner Certification Training
NLP is a complex discipline to learn. It can often take months of concentrated training. We didn’t have months. Denise and I have a business to run. Yet we didn’t want to just read a book or listen to some tapes. We wanted to learn how to use NLP to help the ZATZ team connect better with clients and prospects. We wanted to be taught by actual people.
It turns out that the basics of NLP can be taught in about a week of intense, concentrated study, what’s called an accelerated training program. We found one such program, taught by Advanced Neuro Dynamics, based in Hawaii. Lucky for us, it turned out that the company’s main training program was happening in less than a month.
Denise and I decided to take the plunge, sign up for the course, and buy plane tickets to Honolulu. Sometimes life at ZATZ is tough.
Seriously, though, this was a measurable investment. The course itself costs three thousand dollars. Then, factor in air travel, hotel, food, etc. However, I believe training is one of the most important investments a company can make, and this showed some serious promise. Armed with our plane tickets and course confirmation, Denise and I got to work.
Apparently, one way that Advanced Neuro Dynamics crams all that information into a seven-day training course is to make you work before you get there. A few days after we registered, we were greeted at work by a couple of large packages. Inside were a set of textbooks and two sets of 20 training CDs. We were each expected to read the books and listen to all 20 CDs before we arrived in Waikiki.
Nobody ever said this stuff wouldn’t be work. Just, hopefully, valuable.
We each had different study patterns, but for me, the pre-work consisted of listening to the CDs on the way to and from work, and for an hour or so each night. Even so, I still didn’t finish them by the time we were ready to leave for the plane. Travel from New Jersey to Hawaii takes about fourteen hours, so I had more than enough time to get caught up by listening to the remainder of the training CDs while on the plane. I brought a lot of extra batteries for my CD player! But you know how it is when you’re with a friend on a plane, and I only listened to one more of the CDs.
Finally, we arrived in Honolulu, checked in, and caught a quick night’s sleep. The next morning, class would begin.
.H1 Inside the training
There’s no way I’m going to be able to go over all that was taught during the training week. Given that Saturday and Sunday, we went from morning to late evening, and the rest of the week, we filled 8-hour days in class, there was a lot of material to be covered.
The class was helmed by Dr. Matthew James, a relatively young guy who’s the son of the company’s founder, a very well-respected NLP expert by the name of Dr. Tad James. Even though the younger Dr. James made a number of "Son of" jokes, it was clear he knew his stuff and was quite able to lead the class through its lesson plan.
The class was nicely structured. There were a few hours of lecture, punctuated by group exercises. It was the constant use of group exercises, I think, that made the learning so powerful. We had the chance to try out and test literally every technique we were taught.
The program covered three broad categories of material: NLP, something called Time Line Therapy, and hypnosis. I found this interesting, because I expected the entire course to be NLP. The other topics were useful, and definitely gave a broader understanding of the material, but I was disappointed that some of the more advanced NLP techniques I wanted to learn would be held back for another class, called "Master Practitioner," affectionately known as "Master Prac."
In fact, by the end of the week, I’d heard the term "Master Prac" so often, that it almost felt like we were living in a week long commercial for that course. To be fair, seminar businesses are always in a quest for the sale for the next course, and we did learn a great deal in the course we were in. It just seemed a shame that they seemed the slice through the three disciplines, giving us a piece of each, rather than a full intensive training solely on NLP, which is what I had thought we’d signed up for. Once again, to be fair, we had the chance to learn about two other topics we might not otherwise have been interested in, and they have proven to be quite valuable.
In any case, the first third of the program was dedicated to traditional NLP concepts. These included a series of techniques for establishing strong rapport (a very valuable tool if you’re selling), techniques for determining someone’s strategy for something (a technique that helps you understand what a person needs to see or hear to be sold to, for instance), techniques for helping someone replace likes with dislikes and the reverse (more therapeutic than useful in business, but a great thing to know), and techniques for being able to visually read someone quite effectively (another powerful tool for business people). All in all, I found the traditional NLP portion of the course all I could ask for, and more.
Then we went on to a topic called Time Line Therapy. The idea behind Time Line Therapy is that much of what you process in your mind has a time component. For example, if you hold anger in your mind or body, it’s probably due to a series of events that occurred over time. With Time Line Therapy, you’re able to look at those events, and, in theory, release the anger, thereby making yourself a healthier person. You can, theoretically, use Time Line Therapy to help get over trauma and even to strongly install goals for the future.
To be honest, Time Line Therapy didn’t do it for me, although Denise seemed to get a lot out of it. You’re supposed to picture your time line and "traverse it." I didn’t. I had a hard time doing the exercises. On the other hand, Denise did them and she reports feeling some profound changes, including the releasing of anger, sadness, and guilt that she’s been carrying with her for a long time. Me, I’m still pissed off and ornery.
If I were you, I’d approach the Time Line Therapy portion of the course with an open mind. It’s a fascinating theory and it very well might work for you. If it does, it’ll have some really positive rewards. Over the next few weeks, I plan to re-read the supplied textbook and take another shot at it, because it does intrigue me a great deal.
Finally, we did a few days on hypnosis. If any of you know me, you know I’m rather involved in hypnosis practice. By formal education, I’m a computer scientist. With computers, if you want to fix something, you tweak it and move on. I always figured it’d be great if I could also tweak my mind, so, for example, I’d get up at 8am instead of 10am or finally decide I liked vegetables. I figured that if I could program computers, it’d be cool if I could program the mind as well.
Sadly for my goal to take over the world, hypnosis isn’t quite what I expected, although it’s a very powerful modality. You can’t use hypnosis to make people do anything they don’t want (although I did hypnotize a friend who wanted to…and did…stand on her head and sing Danny Boy–an experience I’ll cherish for years). Instead, hypnosis seems to open up the mind in a way that allows the subconscious to be more effective. If you’re a geek, you’ll understand this concept: for all intents, hypnosis is a way at getting at the mind’s debugger. A key thing to know about hypnosis (and NLP, for that matter) is that it’s not a "do to" discipline, but a "do with" practice. In other words, I can’t do hypnosis to you, but I can do it with you.
Before attending the seminar in Hawaii, I was somewhat familiar with hypnosis, having already received my certification as a clinical hypnotherapist, and started work on a doctorate in the field.
Even so, I still learned a great deal during the course. In particular, I learned much more about a branch of hypnosis called "Ericksonian" hypnosis, named after the father of modern hypnosis, a nice old gent by the name of Milton Erickson. Uncle Milty’s a pretty cool cat. He developed a whole series of hypnotic practices based on metaphor (stories) and word patterns. I’m not going to go into the details of those word patterns (I’d hate to leave all of you hypnotized out there in Internet land), but suffice it to say they’re both effective and a lot of fun to play with.
The big value of the hypnosis portion of the course, again, was the exercises. We had a chance to run through a wide variety of inductions and therapies, and to see them in action with a wide mix of people. I think I learned more in those few days than I would have in six months of reading and practicing with friends.
The course ended Friday evening with a rather intense stage show event. To demonstrate all of the hypnosis techniques pulled together, Dr. James and an associate, one Christopher Howard, did a group induction (meaning that the class was hypnotized as a group). Being the contrarian I am, I didn’t follow their directions and instead watched the whole thing intently rather than allow myself to go into the hypnotic state.
Denise, on the other hand, got deeply involved. In fact, she got so involved that by the end of the event, she was the star of the show. They managed to invoke full-body catalepsy (meaning that her entire body was stiff as a board) and suspend her between two chairs. It was wild. The energy in the room given off by the two leaders, working together, was something I’ll not soon forget.
.H1 Wrapping it up
So now we’re back home and I’ve had some time to reflect on the experience. I consider it a valuable investment. Already, we’ve seen some benefit. Two of my employees asked to be hypnotized, one for sales call aversion (to get over being reluctant to make sales calls) and one for stress management just before a journal’s due to go to press. Both report substantial improvements in their abilities to do their jobs.
I’ve also begun practicing the rapport building skills. For me, the biggest gain has been the benefit of being much more aware of what’s going on in the head of someone I’m talking to, something I never even paid attention to before the class. I’m convinced the NLP techniques I learned will make me a better manager and a better sales person for the company.
Denise is also convinced, and I’m hopeful, that some of the Time Line Therapy techniques can help release some of the pain we’ve been feeling, some of the intense stress of rough economic times in the aftermath of September 11. I’m still not deriving those benefits, but if it helps even one of us manage more effectively, I’m sold.
And that’s the thing. We needed to find new tools to help us deal with this brave new world. We spent one week away, in paradise (OK, so actually it was in a rather dank hotel in a humid city and I ate in a greasy spoon all week, but hey, there were palm trees, and I did discover papaya and lemon which is delicious.), and we learned a series of new tools that we can apply each day at work. I consider this a good return on investment and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s willing to stretch his or her mind.
.H1 The Palm part of the article
Since this is PalmPower, I figured I’d best talk about some Palm aspect of this review. We’re running this article because we think it’s valuable, and we learned some powerful stuff. But I also managed to live off of and run my business via my Palm VIIx during the week. I was able to log in and check my mail, keeping the office running despite a six-hour time difference, and also keep up with current events.
I found that I was quite able to leave my laptop home and rely on my Palm VIIx for a full week of traveling, something I hadn’t been brave enough to try before. I recommend it. The Palm VIIx acquitted itself quite well. Oh, and during the few parts of the class that bored me, I was able to surf the Web and still look like I was paying attention. Now, there’s real value!
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Find out more about seminars from Advanced Neuro Dynamics, Inc. at http://www.nlp.com. You can also call them at the really cool phone number of 1-800-800-MIND, or email your questions to info@nlp.com.
For more information on David Gewirtz’ book, The Flexible Enterprise: How to Reinvent Your Company, Unlock Your Strengths, and Prosper in a Changing World, visit http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/047107246X.
For more information on Palm handhelds, visit http://www.palm.com.
.H1 Easy, flexible article reprints
ZATZ now offers a quick, easy, flexible and inexpensive way to use article reprints in your marketing and promotion efforts. You can now get article reprints for a one-time fee of only $200. For details, visit http://mediakit.zatz.com/reprints.
.END_SIDEBAR
.BIO
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?50@197.GpyEaaYDdH8^11@.ee6fb66
