WTF

When I tripped over the idea of calling the title of this article ‘WTF’ I realised that I might be accused of a whole raft of things from “sensationalism” to “down-wright bad behaviour.”

We live in an ever-increasingly abbreviated world – and I’ve been drawn towards and susceptible to this genre or meta-niche of linguistics, ever since I discovered my schooldays peers calling me “PJ”.
On another youthful occasion, I can remember quite vividly the day we arrived for a maths class and discovered SOHCAHTOA written on the board from the previous lesson. There was a low hum of hushed voices saying “what does it mean?” Someone said it sounded like “Krakatoa”, so maybe it was a volcanic island to the west of Java. Turned out we were all wrong!
As a young football fan I was magnetically attracted to becoming a QPR supporter, and latterly, just as I was drawn to working in IT, I similarly just couldn’t resist embedding myself deeply into the unconscious of NLP.
But I digress, and as you should never try to catch a Digress by its tale, I will depart from the wonderful world of the abbreviation and the acronym PDQ.

Walk the Floor

Earlier this year I met a very interesting lady at a networking event, and we compared notes about our respective working passions. In the course of our discourse I happened to mention how important physical movement can be in terms of the embodiment of changes we might want to make in our lives. Methodologies and models such as TimeLine™ Therapy, Perceptual Positions, Clean Space and Metaphors of Movement make particular use of how physically changing perspectives can facilitate a level of intuitive embodiment that we just cannot engage with easily in the comfort of our own mind.

“So,” I said, “the mere act of walking the floor or changing your spatial location can leave certain perceived associated feelings in one place and allow you to notice different ones in the new place. This can often be a catalyst for profound change.”
“I see,” she said, “that’s really interesting. So if I feel bad about something and go for a walk, then this might be why things often feel different when I come back.”
“That’s right. To help change anything, I’d recommend walking the floor because it can help in many ways!”

“Walk the Floor,” she said. “Mmm... I like that! I shall always remember you as the ‘Walk the Floor’ Man.”

However - it's not just about leaving our chair or going for a walk - there's more that can be done with such an exercise.
If we go through a state-break routine and dissociate from the feeling(s) at Position A before we step away and go somewhere else (Position B), we can leave a lot of stuff behind that we don’t want, at Position A. **
Most of us will go out for a walk, for instance, still carrying our ‘burdens’or churning things over in our mind – and even if we resolve things on our walk, we might still bring some of the ‘baggage’ or ‘litter’ back with us, metaphorically stuffed into our pockets. Leaving it 'bagged up and binned' somewhere else is arguably a much better idea. 

QED!

** (There is a small caveat here - Position A is now sullied with negative energies and associations, so if you are able to - I'd invite you to 'bag and bin' these too. Otherwise you might find yourself re-adopting the energies as you reoccupy a particular chair, for instance, with all the same sitting postures as before.)

So, given my propensity for abbreviating all manner of things, this article about “Walk the Floor” has morphed into WTF. And was this a strategy to turn heads in the Social Media? Well - only you can answer that I guess! For me, however, the real burning questions are these:-

Can anybody tell me why abbreviated is such a long word, or why the word monosyllabic has so many syllables?

The Book of Judgement

At the end of a coaching session last evening I was watching a lad bowling a tennis ball at his brother.
The first one went wide to the left - and the second one went wide to the right. There was plenty of huffing and puffing, shrugging of shoulders, and a chorus of "I can't bowl with tennis balls - they're so light."
It was an interesting array of excuses and beating himself up - all tilling and making fertile ground for seeds of self doubt to come along and germinate.
"So what," you might say - "we're human - we do that all the time."

The thing is, for us to have learnt how to beat ourselves up and make excuses, we must have had a teacher or teachers, from whom we have modelled our behaviours. At this point in our young lives we take our models as exemplars, and firmly believe this is the way the world is. We are not judges of their energies or wisdom, we just code up our experience with readings from their Book of Judgement; whether we are surrounded by those with a spirit of understanding, generosity and learning through experience, or whether we are surrounded by one-eyed perfectionists!
What happens then is that our own growing and expanding Book of Judgement - and its inherent hierarchy of values - is taking shape based upon our, understandably immature, comprehension of the nature of the data in our world.

We learn very young what happens when we cry out for attention, and also the kinds of expressions and responses we get from others when we are doing things and learning to do things. These are the building blocks of the way we are framing up our maps of the world.
Consider the difference we might notice when someone says to us, "Do it again, " as compared to "Try again." The first is merely an overt instruction to repeat - whereas the second is a covert instruction to repeat plus a presupposition that a) we'd got it wrong, made a mistake and b) that we were trying in the first place.

"Yes, but isn't this all common parlance?" you may ask.
Well, yes and no - but whichever way you look at it there's quotes in there from someone's Book of Judgement, not ours!

When the word "try" is employed and, with young ears, we get to hear it a lot, we build an understanding as to what it means. We then take with us the idea that whenever we hear it, and whoever we hear it from - that it always means the same. So - what starts to happen when we hear it used in a phrase such as "try harder"? It's always said like that, too - not "try more", which is what the real intention is behind the instruction.

There's an interesting exercise you might do with a group of adults, which is to get them to demonstrate - in a physical way - what kind of pose and posture they might adopt in order to be seen to be "trying harder". There's a tension in the bodies and limbs, a clenching of the fists and or jaw, and so on. Any relaxed or grounded state is probably the furthest away thing on view. And when we adopt this state and posture - what are the chances of us actually giving the task (mental or physical) our best shot?

So, for the young lad I was observing, his next effort after two "errors" was probably going to be framed in "try harder" mode. Arguably, therefore, a good time for me to intervene.

"Joe when you bowl allow your front foot to land. That way you'll have stability. Sometimes when you bowl you release the ball before the foot has landed - so you are only balanced on one leg. And when you are moving and on one leg your balance isn't as strong as when you are on two! Allow that front foot to land and see what happens."
Joe bowled, allowed the front foot to land and - Hey Presto - the ball went dead straight, exactly where he wanted.
"Cor," he said, "How do you know all the answers!"
"Ah," I said, "I don't know all the answers. I do know most of the questions, though - because I've seen lots of people bowl and there aren't that many questions!"
He laughed and carried on bowling, most of the time allowing his front foot to land - and knowing when he bowled wide that he probably hadn't allowed it to land.
The other thing that may already have started to happen, is that some of the pages in his Book of Judgement have now been updated with a degree of objectivity that may begin to filter into other chapters.

In conclusion I would like to offer you two things to consider.

Have a good look at the words and quotations in your own Book of Judgement. Are they useful for you in your life, or are there some that might need to be updated - especially if you've brought them with you from a very early age.

And finally ...
Sport is fun - Sport is learning - Learning is fun - Sport is life - Learning is life - Life is fun.

Impersonal

The Practice

I recently touched base with a young cricketer (we’ll call him Tom) whom I hadn’t seen for about 8-9 weeks. In that time the season had begun and he’d been involved in quite a number of matches and practices at his own club and at school. Prior to that we’d worked together on a weekly basis through the winter, where – through his application and dedication – his skill levels, expertise and confidence had grown by considerable degrees.

His Mum had said to me, “Tom’s not comfortable with his bowling. He’s unhappy with what he’s doing; the coaches at school have changed part of his technique,” and so on, etc.

Now, his Mum’s description of things was probably not his – but instead her interpretation of how he’d described it to her. Interpretations, such as these, are re-personalisations – and we all do this kind of thing perhaps many times a day in the course of our conversations and thinking. So, as we walked to the practice area, I checked out with Tom what HE felt like and what HIS thoughts were – and there was a marked difference between the two versions I’d heard!

Next, along with a number of other players, we just launched into a very informal practice session. Tom looked happy and comfortable enough, and as far as I could see the technique changes (ironing out a small, yet common enough, quirk) looked very well in place and established. And then he bowled a wide ball...and then he bowled a short ball...and out came all the negative body language!

“So what are you thinking right now?” I asked him.
“I’m thinking about getting it wrong,” he replied.
“And what are you thinking about doing next?” I continued.
“To try and not do it, again.”

Now this is a very regular and common conversational scenario for any coach. However, while these are very predictable answers, I’d invite you to consider what he might have said had I asked him, “So – HOW ARE you thinking right now?”
To be honest, as he's an 11/12 year old I’d probably still get the same answer from him – though, I might not. There might be a pause, a gap in time, a space where he might go on an “inner search” for the words so his unconscious could assemble an answer to this somewhat different question.
I might casually put it another way, “So – WHAT IS your thinking right now?” The implication here is less specific – more along the lines of “tell me about your train of thought”.

Curious, isn’t it, how we might put (what is for us) a question to hopefully elicit a specific answer – and yet the person we’re asking can interpret it in as many different ways as we can ask it.
Although I’m digressing slightly here, I’m inviting you to just consider the level of personalisation we are capable of bringing to any and all proceedings.

The practice continued, as did our conversation.

“Tom, with the wide ball and then the short ball, can you change what’s just happened, what’s just gone?” I asked him, and he shook his head.
“There’s some useful information in those mistakes,” I said, “but most of us are usually so niggled or upset with ourselves at having made them, that we never get to notice the useful information.” He smiled, relaxing a little more.
“The other thing is – as you have said – we THEN start trying to correct what we are about to do next. How weird is that?” I asked.
“Before we actually do the next thing we are going to do, we are already trying to correct it. Doesn’t that mean we know what we are going to do – i.e make a mistake – and try not to do it?!”
He was chuckling at this stage – a very nice unconscious response!

I explained to Tom what I could see from what he wasn’t telling me verbally, and asked him to notice what starts to happen for him when he stops trying. 

“With the things your coaches have helped you change – the body, those muscles, they need time to adjust to doing things in a different way. And from what I can see, they’ve made all those adjustments very well already. All you need to do now is let them get on with what they do best – by not thinking about all of that. Just put your focus onto WHERE you want the body, those muscles, to put the ball when you bowl next. And the best way to do that is to put ALL your seeing power, your focus and inside attention onto THAT place. You can help that by switching off, or turning down other things to do with your senses - like, what you can hear and feel around you, AND that voice inside your head that is part of your thinking.

The linguistic level of impersonalising, especially his body, his muscles, was not done without purpose. So "your body, your muscles" becomes "the body, those muscles".
In my experience perfectionists are perfectionists, even in practice – and are very good at beating themselves up, and perpetuating that self-berating. By tinkering with the nature of THEIR own particular mind-body link, then changes of their self-perception can be brought about.

Yes I AM my body, but minds only think and bodies only act. The mind is where I see and think perfection, or imperfection. Bodies carry out actions initiated from the mind, and they need to “learn their lines”, so to speak, when it comes to sequences of action.

Viewing the body as a separate partner helps “I” to realise that the errors, the imperfections, are perpetuated by the thinking in the mind and not the actions of the body. And that the responsibility for the actions lies with the thinking.

Good quality thinking = good quality actions;
imperfect quality thinking = imperfect quality actions.

Calling practice – and their own particular practice – work in progress, can also open doors for players in this regard. Again it disengages the structure of “I’s” thinking from their previously held propensity for making incessant self-judgements and demands of getting it right.

I’m pleased to report that Tom’s body language and self-dialogue soon got into a much more grounded place, and he was then able to make a much better use of the conditioning nature of the practice session. The proof of the pudding is always when he is away from the ‘comfort zone’ of our session and in the different kitchens of practice elsewhere and – most of all – the cauldron of competition!

“The Zone”

This particular session was also useful for me on reflection – in regards to “The Zone”, being in it, and how to get to it, and how to stay in it. For sports persons in particular it’s a place where the level of detachment from thinking is total; where IMPERSONAL is at 100%.

It’s always deemed to be the “Holy Grail” of performance, and as such there are many chronicles of the search for it!
I’d invite you to consider this small linguistic artifice:-

I’M PERSONAL
IMPERSONAL

Now if we want to get to 100% Impersonal, where there are no breaks or joins in the word, then the level of thinking needs to be 0%. And we all know, because we’ve all been “in the zone” at some point in our life’s performance, that our memory of such an event is that we were not thinking – just doing. Everything seemed to just flow with a thoughtlessly smooth quality. For some it was like watching ourselves from some detached place.

Getting back to :-

I’M PERSONAL
IMPERSONAL

The only visible difference is one apostrophe and one space; the pronunciation is different; but the letters are the same.

The moment we let “I” into our thinking there is a trade-off somewhere else. Percentage points start to drop off IMPERSONAL until, if we are so inclined, we become completely bound up in our own “I” thinking and it becomes totally Personal. And we all know what happens when we take things personally, don’t we! Do these sound familiar...?

What do I look like? What will they think of me? Don’t they know who I am? She told me I was stupid! They said awful things about me! I want to make an impression!  And that perennial classic, I said to myself, you can’t do this!

So getting into The Zone is arguably a much more straightforward thing than the Holy Grail hunters would have us believe, and staying in it is not the feat of epic proportions we might have once thought it was. 
In essence - WE needs to get out of OUR thinking. It needs to become IMPERSONAL and then things start to flow. The moment we start to get in our own way by allowing “I” to get in there, the flow begins to get slower and stagnate.

To use another modality – stagnant water smells pretty rank. So if we want the sweet smell of success that comes from performing in The Zone, then we need to get the water flowing again by dredging out all the personal stuff.

It's just a thought, of course!

You - Me - Here - Now

I was recently part of an online discussion and in the course of the interaction there were a number of interesting comments and, as a result of my being drawn into the conversation, there was a notable personal discovery. Going into any dialogue with an open mind usually facilitates such things.

 

The topic was primarily about rapport and how relevant matching and mirroring are in terms of pacing and leading conversants (that's clients essentially - unless you are 'practicing' in a social or business context) into rapport.

Now matching and mirroring fall into the category of what I would call 'nuts and bolts' of NLP. Another of the online participants posted up a video of John Grinder, one of the 'founding fathers' of NLP, talking about Modelling Excellence as being the core of the subject, and that around that core are a series of processes that make the Modelling effective. Grinder's observation was that most practitioners of NLP are only using "the end product of those processes".

This brought me to this reflective conclusion:

If you believe all screwdrivers are electric and you've only ever used an electric screwdriver, then without the power source you won't be able to screw screws, even though power screwdrivers have manual settings! Thus the art of firmly attaching something A to something B using device C (a screw) by way of the process of 'screwing', is a quite a long way from your raw ability to use an electric screwdriver - even though sometimes things seem to work very well!
 

This really explains why there's so much more to NLP than looking into the bag of tools, and how those who don't quite 'get' this, end up down blind alleys when attempting to use the tools.

 

The inter-twinedness of NLP and hypnosis

I was, unwittingly, hugely fortunate in that my initial hypnotic tutors were also NLP trainers and my early learnings of both were totally integrated. I've since discovered that this is not standard across the educative spectrum, as subsequent courses and workshops I've attended have contained 'non-hypnotic' NeLPers and hypnotists not conversant in NLP. 

 In the NLP and hypnosis relative balance, earlier in my practice I would be more direct with using NLP processes and 'softer' with hypnotic processes. These days I am the other way round.
So, for instance in terms of matching and mirroring, I now find myself not so much 'doing' matching and mirroring, but more as 'being the mirror'.

Listening for Speed!

 

In the case of rapport - in my experience it is the Act of Listening which is not only the 'speed route' to rapport - but also enables me to notice and gather much, much more of the verbal and non-verbal information on offer.
We all have 'protective fields' around us and rapport helps break them down. The Act of Listening drops our own 'protective field' and leads our client(s) - by the non-verbal route - into mirroring us. By totally engaging in the listening process, it's almost as if I have 'disarmed' myself and surrendered. If I should harbour any semblance of vulnerability, then the listening and my 'disarming' process will be less authentic - and that difference in my level of energy will be detected (on some level) by the client. As a result the entire dynamic between us will be different.

 

Energies are Pointers (and other dogs!)

 

I've discovered a lot about the shifting levels of interactive energies in a practical sense, from watching "The Dog Whisperer", which is a TV programme where Cesar Millan rehabilitates problem pet dogs AND, for lasting change, trains the owners. At the start of each 'client session' he listens to the owners explaining the pet's behaviour, and then he observes the problem hounds in action. His entire changework paradigm for the dog is based on their mental energy - and he gets rapport by pacing and leading! Once in rapport he can take the dog through the 'rehab' process. As he often says, the dog lives entirely in the NOW (even though there may be some conditioned habits). All the changes and reconditioning also take place, understandably, in the NOW. This is one of the places where owners get 'out of sync' with what is going on for their pets - because they usually aren't in the Now! Owners are also not aware of how much of their own state (energy level) is transmitted to, received by and mirrored back by their dogs.
Each programme is like observing an interactive NLP workshop! 

 

Am I doing or being?

 

In conversational NLP the linguistic artifices and perspectives can be very 'hypnotic' too, since we are shifting people's perceptions, changing their realities, engaging their imagination, and eliciting hypnotic phenomena. I've had a number of clients whose world-view of hypnosis scared them, or they felt uncomfortable, or was against their religion, or they were skeptic - but for whom "just a chat" was totally acceptable and relaxing. Given that these were just their perceptions - should I have explained to them the inter-twinedness of the two domains?

Well, people see me because of the narrow band-width of their perceptions, and how this causes certain things for them they'd rather change. If they don't want to ride on the train, we'll go there by car instead - and that's how it is, in my book.

 

The other question of course is when am I using NLP and hypnosis (and indeed all the tools from other domains)? In truth - all the time; with clients, coachees, friends, in the street.  They are part of my 'ordinary', part of my perspectives, part of my world-view. Of course it's as well to remember I am not here to change the world, for there are times when it's prudent and sensible to shut up. Never play Devils Advocaat with a tee-totaller; or try to out-think a snake!

 

Conclusion

 

This brings me to what this post is all about - conversations and interactions - which are Dialogues.

Dialogues are all about "You - Me - Here - Now". In order to have a dialogue we need to be good at expressing ourselves and we need to be good listeners. The better we are at language and the better we are at listening and noticing - then the better the dialogue.

The main thing about dialogue is that we humans have a tendency to twist it out of shape by preframing it with "You - Me - There - Then" - whatever the reasons for that might be! Some might be constructive - however, we need to be mindful and careful about what we let in to the Now from Then.

Back in the days when I sat on a number of Committees, or indeed was a Secretary of some organisations, there was always an Agenda item called "Matters Arising". On many occasions I recall too much time being spent on this section - as participants raked over the dead coals and dying embers of the previous meeting. I realise this is down to the quality of the Chair of the meeting - but the whole "he said X - she did Y" is often a less than constructive perpetuation of previous Dialogues.

 

If we allow "You - Me - Here - Now" to really take place, then "Moving On" becomes much more of a possibility.
However, although it's just a thought, I'd invite you to try it yourself and discover what has already  become different from whatever expectations you may have once held.