NLP Techniques for the Impatient

I have been studying Hypnosis, Accelerated Learning and related topics including NLP since I was fifteen years old. I was a really impatient teenager and wanted to learn everything fast, in double quick time. I have not got any less patience as I have got older. When I started getting into the whole coaching malarkey I wanted a system where I could assist a client to make dramatic changes instantly. The vision I had in my head was a client would come in with a presenting problem and leave after a short session having made dramatic changes. NLP is great for this sort of thing. And having that sort of mindset I spent a lot of time developing techniques to really create fast changes with clients. But as my experience grew I discovered that a lot of deep changes can be made with people easily if they didn’t know it was happening.

People are Invested in their Problems

Reading that headline and thinking about the statement will be enough for you to recognise how true this is. Because people can never truly see anything except through their own eyes it makes them feel like their problems are bigger, better and more deep seated than anyone else’s. This is the root of all the “man flu” issues. We also know that the reality is a little different and having a different view on the problem is what keeps it in perspective. Using this idea I developed a whole slew of techniques where I would covertly blow out the problem conversationally.

Destroying My Coaching Business

Prospects would phone be and I would start with something like this; “Before we agree to work together I would like to ask you some questions to find out if you and your problem are a suitable for my approach.” I would then under the guise of assessing their suitability start working on the problem. Most of the time it would take me a few minutes of chatting and asking questions to take the problem away from them. I would then find out that they didn’t feel the need to book my coaching services. At one point I got so desperate that I would still blow people’s problems out (I just couldn’t help myself) but then I would try to put just a little bit of it back so they would book a coaching session with me. But as I got better and I developed more techniques I found I got more dramatic results in shorter time. And I enjoy watching people with deep seated problems that they have had for a long time notice that the problem has suddenly vanished. And I love developing these processes. The truth is it doesn’t always work and some stuff need / takes time to work on. But those were never the clients I wanted except when I was working on another way of accelerating the process. Eventually I got to the point where I am today where I take on just a few coaching clients for the practice and joy of working with them or if they have interesting problems. But most of the time I am busy with other things.

And then the Phone Rang

Every now and again I would answer the phone to someone that wants some help and I would forget that I don’t really do this stuff anymore and I would get really curious about their problem to the point where they will just blow it out completely. This happened to me last month and I asked Jane (name changed for anonymity) to briefly write up the experience from her perspective:

How do I spend my time now?

So having developed tools and techniques that covertly blow out people’s problems…can you imagine the joy I have when I get the opportunity to do some of this stuff with a random stranger in a pub?.. I teach people how to do this sort of thing. Here are some of the ways some of my students are using the tools and techniques I have developed:

• Teachers and trainers are blowing out the fear of failure in groups of students
• Coaches, therapists and change workers taking out the presenting problems before they “start” their session
• Job Seekers reframe the holes in their qualifications and experience as key strengths
• Sales professionals undercutting objections and creating better buying opportunities
• Parents developing self-esteem and confidence in their children just by asking how their day went

Right here is a short interview from Carol Seaborne about how she is using these tools and techniques in her practice, her business and her life. Just click through the link in the picture to find out what impact learning these skills has had.     If you want to learn how to develop these skills for yourself then click through and read about the NLP course right here.

The Persuasion Skills Black Book

Here is the email I received from Richard a reader of the Persuasion Skills Black Book:

Hi

I have a question re the first two sections in the book – Redefines and Agreement Frames. Rintu gives an example of someone whom he has worked out is 1. Self-Referential 2. Motivted by ROI etc …it strikes me that using Redefines etc are much more powerful if you have that info . How do you find that out about a person ? Does that come later in the book ? I know a small amount about Rep systems but often struggle to \’hear\’ them / work them out

Any hints ? Should I just keep reading the book ?

All replies appreciated

Richard

The Issue isn’t Finding out Material it Is About Using What You are Presented With

Here is my response:

Hi Richard,

Okay the short answer is that it is a practised skill. The easiest way to practice it is to listen to conversations that you are not directly involved with and just pick out what you can. Here is the exercise specifically for you. Watch chat shows, interviews or anything else where there is an unrehearsed, unscripted conversation. Imagine you were going to use a persuasion pattern on one of the people in the conversation, we will use the x/y redefine as the example for the minute. Listen to a little bit of the conversation and then decide how you would build what you have just heard into the pattern. The more you do this the more you will find pick up and using information from conversations easier.

Hope that helps.

Cheers

Rintu

Of course if you want countless examples of me taking what is offered by an audience and folding that back on them in terms of a language pattern you can read the transcript of a three hour persuasion skills workshop. This is what makes Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed my most powerful course ever. But don’t take my word for it. Find out what others think about the course when you click through here:

NLP Techniques Applied to Training and Coaching

As a trainer I very quickly learnt the value of preparation. I am not talking about preparation like having your notes ready, knowing the material and that sort of thing. All of that is obvious. What I am talking about is making sure your audience is prepared for you and the learning.

This could take the form of setting expectations, removing common limiting beliefs, installing a massive compulsion to succeed and any number of things dictated by the context and situation.

When I first started working as a coach I quickly discovered that many people come in with beliefs that limit how well you can work with them. One simple example would be many clients would come in with the belief that the problem they were facing was so tough that it would take a lot of coaching for them to resolve.

Very quickly I learnt that coaching has some similar aspects to training. Getting your clients or students prepared for the learning, the development or result was far more important than the intervention itself. Consider the example above, if a client has already decided that it will take hypothetically five sessions to be coached over a particular issue they will not be satisfied until they have spent the “due” time.

Whereas even if you spent the whole of the first session shifting that belief to something like, “I can find a solution in just one session”, you will have saved three coaching sessions. And I now have a frame that blows this sort of thing out in minutes so you don’t even have to spend a session discussing it. I will give you the pattern further down the page but first let me give you the whole problem.

Ruled By Emotion, Justified on Logic

It would be great if we could take limiting beliefs and get our clients and audiences to believe something different just through logic. But this rarely happens. Trust me, when I started as a coach I would tell my clients that even though they thought of their problem as huge we could still deal with it in one session.

I would confidently tell them about how many other people came in with the same problem and how they had left having it completely resolved in the one session. My client would explain why their problem was different from everyone else’s. I would explain how the mind works and how quickly the unconscious mind will adapt to new processes if you know the techniques. My clients would explain how they have tried the same thing and why it didn’t work.

The trouble is that when someone holds a belief they will tend to justify, explain and defend it. And as a coach I was constantly pointing out unhelpful beliefs that my client’s would ingrain even further as they defended their position citing the “evidence” and the logic as to why things had to be that way.

A Trainer’s Guide to Coaching

I spent some time looking at solutions to this problem and eventually got a genius idea. Like all good ideas it was incredibly simple once I have realised it. All I need to do was take a leaf out of the trainer’s handbook and just reframe the beliefs before we start coaching.

The first thing I tried with my next client was to get them to briefly tell me about the reason they were there and to rate the problem on a scale of one to ten. Obviously they would rate the problem highly. I would nod at them sagely and say something like, “I can see that this is a really serious problem and that means we have to devote some serious resources to it. I’ll tell you what because the problem is so big, I don’t normally do this, but let’s devote this entire session to resolving it so you know that it has completely gone.”

This whole pattern is designed to pace the client’s initial conception of the problem, set the expectation that we are taking it very seriously and then reframe the meaning of serious to a whole session as opposed to five sessions.

Did this work? Actually more often than I expected. But there is a neat little twist I started doing with my clients that made this pattern work almost every time.

Take the Trance to do some Covert Hypnosis

Imagine what happens with this client if you have taken the time before this covert intervention to explain to them how the mind works. What you might do is split the world into two types of people, those that fit your client’s self-image and those that don’t. You then explain the difference between the two categories. This might include the idea that certain types of people create solutions very fast when they follow a particular process. You obviously link this to your client’s self-image illustrate with examples and give them whatever justifications they need.

As you can see this is a trance induction that is driving your client to identifying with a group of people that think in a particular way and can easily install a compulsion to get the results that they want.

The specifics of what you use can be different for each client. For example if your client is an artist you might talk about common traits with artists is that they can make connections between random things. If you are talking to a business person that you know follows a rigid business model you might draw this as a common trait for successfully business people.

Whatever you are using the end result is a linking phrase such as, “and that means these types of people will become solution focused as soon as they (insert your coaching process) and when they do that they get answers to their issue almost immediately. Now I am not saying that you are in this category (that is the category you have already elicited as their ideal self-image) but you look like you might  be…” I usually pause at this point to allow them to butt in and explain why they are exactly that sort of person. When they do this I know everything has worked properly and they are going to get a great result.

I don’t move from this position until my client is positive this is the right thing for them, that it will work for them and that they are desperate to have a go. I then ask them to rate the problem and do the whole “better spend the whole of the session on it” thing with them. You can guess how quickly they get over the big problem that was stopping them so that they can focus on the “good stuff”.

Covert Coaching Trances

Obviously this is a simplistic example. We have not discussed the specifics of these trance scripts, or what happens if they don’t take the preframes on board or any of the other things you may want to tweak to make this work effectively.

At the end of September I am delivering my first NLP Practitioner course for three years where I will detail my coaching process, the covert trance induction and how you can use Timeline Reframing to blow out beliefs so completely that your client will argue that they have always thought that (the new) way. You can find out more about this NLP Practitioner Course.

Being Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

If we define our comfort zone as all that we know how to do. All the situations, behaviours and thoughts that are habitual and ingrained into your life might be another way of saying comfort zone.

Then all of your learning, growth and development must be outside of your comfort zone and therefore uncomfortable to some degree. To me this means that if you want to learn, grow and develop being a little bit uncomfortable is a natural part of the process.

A Persuasion Skills Interlude

I am currently working on a new course, Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed. It consists of three hours of video recording of a Hypnotic Persuasion Skills Seminar that starts at the same level as the Persuasion Skills Black Book but builds hugely on those foundations with some really cool new techniques and ideas.

But that is not what makes this course special. If you have read some of my articles, books and seen my videos you already know that I use hypnotic persuasion techniques to teach hypnotic persuasion techniques. The beauty of Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed is that the whole training is transcribed and deconstructed. All my patterns, anchors and sneaky trainer tricks that are demonstrated throughout the videos are deconstructed, written down and explained in the accompanying report. It seems to have created a little bit of a stir. You can click through and read a few of the responses here.

The Importance of Mindset

One of the things I deconstruct on the course is how to preframe a conversation so that people are already thinking the way you want them to before you get to anything contentious. For example if I wanted you to donate to a save the elephant fund (I don’t even know if they are endangered it was the first thing that came into my head when searching for an example) I would want to set a frame around the conversation first.

After introductions and any scene setting that we needed to do I would discuss the ivory trade, the near extinction of certain types of elephant, the cruelty and barbarism of it all. The important thing would be to engage you into the conversation in such a way that you state open support for doing something about helping elephants. I guess you can see how much easier I could now get a donation from you, and you would, depending on how the conversation was managed be even happier to donate the money.

On this course I used the idea of comfort zones and turning confusion to understanding as an important element of preframing the mindset that I want the students in. What has completely amazed me is what Bill managed to do with this little concept. Here he is in his own words:

 Some Concluding Thoughts

When I look at accelerated learning for a subject I look for three things. The easy one is the tools and techniques. For example with NLP language Patterns the patterns are the tools we focus on. The trouble is there is no point in learning these tools if you have beliefs that don’t support you using them.

In short I want to work on a beliefs and identity level with you before I introduce you to any content. The tools are generally easy to learn and apply once the beliefs are in the right place. The beauty of Persuasion Skills on Steroids Deconstructed is that you get to see me work that process with the students on the recording and that also works on you as you watch the course.

You can then go through the deconstruction and break it down so you see how I constructed it in the first place and how you can build it up for your own purposes. You get it again on a third level when you look at the whole course overall and notice that I have applied the same process again to the whole course.

The best thing about this is because you have to think through the course on multiple levels we can bypass much of your conscious faculties and you can take on a lot of the information on an unconscious level. Here is an example of how powerful that can be.

Programming Deep Unconscious Behaviour

In the Advanced Persuasion Patterns Programme we spend quite some time exploring unconscious drivers, how to elicit them, use them and also how you can change or install new ones in your audience. To be able to do this conversationally and covertly is a key tool in hypnotic persuasion because these unconscious drivers are incredibly powerful. You also get active demonstrations of this as the course shows you how to install the values and beliefs of an irresistible persuader at the same time as giving you the tools to be exactly that.

If you have ever had the situation where you have consciously decided to do something but you distract yourself or find yourself doing something different this could be your values operating. Your unconscious mind is a much more powerful motivator than your conscious mind therefore you might consciously decide to go to the gym but your unconscious mind might just reach for a tub of ice cream instead. Trust me over time your unconscious mind will always win.

Imagine the power you have over your own mind if you can realign your values to support what you want to do. How would it be if you could change your values so you are motivated towards your results and then you take away any limiting beliefs and place in some empowering ones? The video below will give you a lot more detail about beliefs and values in a training context.

NLP Coaching with Values and Beliefs

Here is a fairly typical scenario I have seen with some of the clients I have worked with. Consciously this guy wants to make more money but he values having fun as more important than building his business. For this person there are a couple routes he could go. For example he could realign the criteria for his values so that building business is one definition of fun for him. Another approach might be to make building business a higher value than having fun. There are several other roads this guy could take but this should be enough idea for you to get the picture.

Once he has looked at his values it might be useful for him to think about his beliefs. For example here are a range of beliefs that I have come across that would make this guy’s life difficult in this context:

• You have to work really hard to make money
• I don’t deserve to be rich
• The only people that have money are crooks, sharks and the greedy
• Money is the root of all evil

Can you see how these sorts of beliefs would cause this guy to falter?

The trick as a coach is to be able to analyse you client on the basis of their values and beliefs and then how to swap and change them around. The same is true of personal development work that you are doing for yourself. One of the things I have been working on is a bunch of models and processes that make this simple to do. This is what I will be outlining for the NLP 96 group on Tuesday 15th.

The Advanced Persuasion Patterns Programme uses these concepts to develop an incredibly powerful persuasive personality and as you work through the course you will see how I consistently apply a particular approach to ensuring that you have the values and beliefs in place to support the use of the incredibly powerful hypnotic persuasion tools that you learn on the course. This is what makes Advanced Persuasion Patterns different from most Hypnotic Persuasion Skills programmes on the internet. We certainly discuss those powerful tools and how they work, but both overtly and covertly right through the course I am working with you to install the values and beliefs that can make you an irresistible persuader. Click through and find out more here: