Effective Communication With NLP & The Enneagram

Here’s a pretty good video explaining how NLP can be relevant in our everyday communication. It focuses on how a same string of words can be interpreted differently by everyone. The speaker thus emphasises that it is important to clearly relate your intention to the other party and ensure that the meaning that is being received is exactly what you want to convey.

Although eye movements and usage of words are the more common ways of accessing a person’s Representational Systems, there are other accessing cues as well. The way we think will always show up somewhere in our behaviour.

For example, a visual person who is constructing images as they talk will then to speak faster and possibly at a higher pitch. This allows them to keep up with the images in their brain. In addition, their breathing will be more shallow, and their muscles will be more tensed.

Auditory people who think in sounds breathe more evenly over the chest area, unlike visuals who breathe higher up in their chests. Their tonality is often clear and expressive. Usually, their heads will be well balanced on the shoulders or tilted slightly, as if they are listening to something.

A feeling or kinesthetic person will breathe low in their stomach area, and have more relaxed muscles. Their heads tend to tilt down and their tonality is deeper, with pauses in their slightly slower speech. Those who talk to themselves are also likely to look down. Sometimes, they may lean their head on a side using their hands. For some, they even repeat what they just hear to themselves, so you might spot a bit of lip moving.

Of course, this is a general description of how other parts of our body will react according to the way we think. When you are observing others, it is always good to be flexible since we are not produced from a factory assembly line.

Have you ever had situations where you felt that you couldn’t achieve something? Or perhaps a friend of yours was lacking in motivation and felt that they wouldn’t be able to complete a task?

How do you normally handle such situations?
How do you empower yourself or your friends, and bring them from a “limitation state” into an empowered state?

One of the quickest way is to use “How Questions”. How questions allow you to turn people around easily. When faced with challenges, we usually think of limitations and things that we can’t do. This is normal, and very human.

So for example, a friend of yours tells you there is no way he or she would be able to complete the marathon you’ve both signed up for. Instead of just encouraging by saying things like “Of course you can!” or “I’m sure you can do it”, empower that person by asking “How can you start training up for the marathon?”

This puts the person in a state of mind where he or she must now think of actions to take, in order to be ready for the marathon.

Likewise, if someone were to say “I’m not confident enough to speak in front of people”, you can empower that person by asking “How can you start to be relaxed about public speaking?”

So the next time you encounter a situation where you face limitations, remind yourself that you can choose to continue concentrating on the limitations, or empower yourself and others by choosing to think about possibilities. Start using statements that shift your mind towards possibilities instead of limitations, and increase your influence today!

Our mind works in such a way that it doesn’t recognise commands such as Don’t, or Do Not. When you tell someone not to do something, the image that appears in the person’s mind will be exactly the stuff that he or she isn’t suppose to do.

A few days back, I was waiting at the train station and I saw a mum trying to get her kids to stop shouting and running about. She went, “Don’t make so much noise!” As expected, the kids kinda ignored her and went on enjoying themselves.

You see, when you tell someone not to make so much noise, the message that gets registered in their heads will be making noise, rather than keeping quiet. To get someone to keep quiet, a more effective message would be simply, “Keep quiet!”.

Of course, you might argue that since they are kids, whatever you say probably won’t make a difference. Even if this is true, the mum will still stand a better chance by asking them to keep quiet instead of asking them not to make noise. This applies to many things in life.  If you want someone to be punctual, you tell them to “be early” instead of “don’t be late”.

So the next time you’re about to tell somebody not to do something, stop for a moment and think about what you want instead. Then rephrase and communicate what you want, and you’ll probably end up having more successes.

I was at Expo over the weekend to compete in the National Cashflow Competition, and it was quite a fruitful outing. Got to know some like minded friends and won a ticket to the National Achievers’ Congress for getting out of the rat race. 

One of the key advantages that our team had over the rest of the competition was the common focus. Even before the game started, we knew what we had to do and stuck to it. That mutual understanding gave us the luxury of more time, which translated to more throws of the dice, and that could make a huge difference between getting a good deal and just missing out.

In other words, our team had been properly “Framed Up”. Everyone was in the right frame of mind going into the competition. This framing of mindset is a technique from NLP, and using it prior to any activity or event is extremely effective, especially if you are in teaching or training, or chairing a meeting. Set your audience in the correct frame of mind by telling them the areas of focus they should adopt, or boundaries they should stay within.

A simple example would be the setting of rules before a training session. Informing the audience of the rules frames them up in terms of what their expected behaviours would be, and this sets the stage for a more rewarding session because everyone would be in the right frame of mind.