Empowering life strategies
posted in Home |Empowering life strategies.
Did you know that we all have neurologically programmed strategies for everything that we do? These are particular patterns of thoughts and behaviours that produce particular (or predictable) results. The question is - are you happy with your current results? Do your current strategies empower or disempower you?
The other day I was relaying a story about when I was doing my NLP (Neuro Lingusitic Programming) training. It was a session to learn how to elicit someone’ decision-making strategy. My task was to sell my pen to another course participant. My partner turned out to be a discerning, analytical, medical specialist. Hmmm. This was going to be interesting. How could I possibly entice this person to want my plain, old, ordinary, bic biro????
The first step was to determine his decision-making strategy for purchasing. I did this by asking specific questions and by tracking his language patterns and the location and sequence of his eye movements as he responded. Once I felt confident that I had determined his current decision making strategy for purchasing, the next step was to entice him to buy my pen. Firstly this was to be done by presenting an offer for him to purchase my pen in the opposite pattern to the elicited pattern. When I did this it felt like we were from different planets and that there was absolutely no connection or understanding between us. On the second attempt I presented the pen to him in the exact same sequence to the original pattern that I had tracked. Wow, what a difference! He asked -Can I hold the pen? At the end he really wanted my boring, old, blue bic biro!
What does this mean? This means that if we present things in a way that matches the other person’s strategy we can communicate much more effectively with them. Basically, we are stepping into their moccasins. This also means that if someone wants to change a disempowering behaviour they can install a new strategy. For example, someone who is moving deeper and deeper into debt because of a faulty buying strategy may need to add a step into his current pattern to analyse whether he really needs to make the purchase.
A penny dropped for me when I learnt about the Love strategy. There are three different ways that people associate feeling loved. One is visual. It feels like they are totally loved when they are shown with actions, like being taken out to dinner and bought things. Other people feel totally loved when they are told so or when they hear a certain tone of voice (auditory). Meanwhile, others feel loved when they are hugged or held tight (kinesthetic). I have come to understand that my daughter has a visual strategy and don’t our wallets know it. $$$$$.
Once again, this highlights the importance of using the other person’s strategy which may not be the same as your own. Furthermore, it is important to know how you feel loved, and to share this information with your loved ones.
We have neurologically programmed strategies for getting up in the morning, being late, being punctual, feeling confident, feeling depressed, for learning, and for sex. If you think about it what are the strategies that naturally thin people use? They do things like: eating at regular times; they make good choices about what they eat; and they generally keep active and exercise. How empowering are the current strategies that you are using?
Jane Buxton
Performance & Development Coach, NLP Practitioner, B. Psych.
M: 0403 056 241