Day 7: Leadership and Influence
NLP Canada Training, Linda Ferguson
https://nlpcanada.com/nlp-practitioner-video-series/day-7-leadership-and-influence/

Transcript

When we collaborate, we develop rapport so that we can find common ground and move together. When we negotiate, we get in rapport so that we can find common ground and then step people towards our goals, knowing that we may have to give up some things to get what we want. When we lead, we invite people to follow, to follow our state. To follow our direction, to follow our perceptions and to engage in the frames that we set. Leadership takes knowledge and it takes discipline: the discipline to master your own state, your own vision, and your own goals while paying attention to the needs and perceptions and states of the people you lead. I'm Linda Ferguson. Welcome to day seven of the NLP practitioner certification at NLP Canada Training.

We start as always thinking about states and leadership states. And you might be tempted to start out by thinking about these big states of, you know, charismatic leaders, the Tony Robbins, "I am great, anchor that!" kind of state. But it will take you just moments to think of leaders you have followed in your life, whether they are leaders at work, leaders in the community, leaders in your family. And you will find that very often that's not the kind of state they lead in.

So instead, we're going to start the day by calibrating your own ability to lead, your own leadership states, and how they change in two different conditions. The first condition is a situation where you know what to do, a situation where you have certainty about the important things in the situation and where to go next. But the other kind of leadership. That is equally important and sometimes more important, is that sometimes you have been in a position where you had to lead in uncertainty. You had to lead in situations where you knew you did not have all the information you needed. The information might change mid-course. You weren't sure that you had the courage or the competence to do the right thing, but you had people who were following you.

And so you led anyway. And in a calibration game, you can very quickly experience in your body, in your senses, in your thoughts about yourself, and your thoughts about the world, the difference between leading in certainty and leading in uncertainty. Because if you want to be a leader, you have to be prepared for the situations where there isn't enough information and you need to lead anyway. How do you do that? Well, one of the most famous patterns in neuro-linguistic programming is called the Swish pattern. And the Swish pattern is a really simple pattern, simple exercise. You can do it yourself.

You imagine a big screen in front of you. Not so hard if you're looking at a screen right now, but imagine a really big screen and on it you put a really big picture of the outcome that you want so that you are looking at the thing you want. And you allow yourself to fill in that picture knowing that there are gaps, knowing that the future is very rarely exactly what we imagine. But you make a really good big picture of a goal. And then you clear the screen and you allow a new picture to come onto that screen. And that is a picture of one thing that is getting in your way. One thing that is slowing you down.

And you will find, if you ask yourself nicely, that one thing will appear on the screen: the thing that stops you from taking the next step. And as you look at it, you imagine that in the corner of that big picture, there is a little picture. And that picture is the picture of your goal. And as you look at your goal, it becomes bigger and brighter and more compelling until it takes over the entire screen with a swish. That's the name. You practice that pattern over and over again so that it gets to the point where as soon as you think about that obstacle, you remember the goal you're heading toward. And the idea is pretty simple.

We don't always know all of the steps down the road. Sometimes we're not even sure of the first step. But what really stops us is letting go of our desired future, of our goal, of our intention. And as long as we keep bringing our conscious awareness back to that goal, we can trust our whole self, our brain, mind, body connection, our social web, to come to our aid in identifying one next step and then another.

So the key is not that you will always be certain. It is not that you will always know how you're going to get from A to Zed. The key is that even in uncertainty, even when you do not know the next step, you can lead by being clear on where you want to go and holding the state that is appropriate for moving toward that goal, one step at a time. After a break, we think about rapport again. And this is a different kind of rapport. This is what we call pacing and leading in NLP. It means getting into rapport expressly so you can change the state of the other people and bring them into sync with you.

The only way to do that is to interrupt the state they're in. So I call the exercise pacing, leading, and disrupting. And it takes a little nerve because in real life, it's easy to follow. That's what pacing is. Show somebody through matching and mirroring, through reflecting their language, through reflecting their frames, that you are paying attention to them and that you have a kind of understanding. You are in sync or in tune with their point of view. And that feels good for human beings.

It's relatively easy to do and you can keep doing it. But the longer you keep doing it, the more you enter into attunement with somebody else's state. So if you do rapport with somebody who is calm and confident and competent, that's pretty great. You might just stay there.

But if you enter rapport with somebody who has a problem they don't know how to solve, you might forget how to solve it, too. Leading involves making the connection and then having the attention to your own state and goals to make changes and notice if the other person responds by moving to your state, by moving to your perspective, by moving to your framing. So pacing shows that you are paying attention. When you think of it as showing you are paying attention rather than attuning, you remind yourself I'm going into this for a reason. And the reason is that I want to have an influence over this other person to take them out of the state they are in and into a different state which I am holding, which I will continue to hold, which I will project and amplify through connection with them. Pacing takes longer. You do way more of it.

Is there a number? People will give you a number, but really it depends on the relationship. How long does it take you to get properly in sync but not immersed in somebody else's state? Because often you'll be leading people who are in uncertainty and you do not want to forget what you know. You will be leading people who are anxious and you don't want to take on their anxiety. You will be leading people who are reckless and you want to keep an element of safety and balance in your choices.

So when pacing, mirror them but be aware that what you are doing is mirroring them so that you can take a breath and move into your own state and pull them with you. The moment of pivot, the moment when you make a change is disrupting. You pace, you disrupt and then you lead. We use that little game of pacing and leading and disrupting to warm up for a big exercise in doing something that is very useful and very difficult. And that is observing yourself during a conversation. Often we set it up in threes. Two people are having a conversation.

There is also an outside observer. We use a chart and we say throughout a conversation sometimes one person is leading and the other person is following. Sometimes there may be moments when there is disagreement and a breaking of the connection. But in between people are generally moving through negotiation, trying to figure out where the conversation is going to go, whose point of view is going to lead the way, or collaboration where they are building on each other's ideas.

And so you create a chart. It's got a vertical scale from leading, collaborating, negotiating, disagreeing, and you start listening to the conversation. And as the conversation is progressing, you just make little notes of where something changes, what is happening in that conversation. The end of a conversation, we only do about 5 minutes at a time. It's as much as you can keep in your head. If you are one of the participants, if you were participating, you stop and you try and recall the conversation and you notice what you have stored, what your memory is of who is leading, who is following, what was happening.

Then you have a debrief. And if there's an observer, you debrief with the observer, noticing how different people observe different things in the same conversation. And the point is not really to be 100% accurate or to get agreement. The point is to start developing the mental muscle to pull yourself out of a conversation mentally while still engaging and say, "What's going on here?" Not where am I at, but where are we at? Not what am I doing, but what are we doing? Are we in a pattern of leading, a pattern of collaborating, a pattern of negotiating? Or are we disagreeing?

And of course, where do we need to go next? What can I change to change the direction of this conversation? We take another break and then we come back to think: how does this work with concepts? How does it work with meaning? And when we're thinking about concepts or meaning, we are thinking about framing and we're thinking about language. And language and frames, as we've seen throughout the course, are very closely related. They overlap a lot.

It doesn't really matter which one you talk about at any given moment because all language gives meaning and all frames show meaning. They define. So, we start with a nice little exercise where we catch the way people are giving labels to something they're talking about. And labels are those little descriptive words. You know what a label is? You might put it on a cupboard that says files. We might put a label on a file folder.

And you have to pick what word describes everything that's contained in that file. Is it a name? Is it a function? We use a lot of adjectives in our speech. And if you're not familiar with grammatical terms, adjective means describing words. We say something is good, something is nice, something is infuriating, something is crazymaking, something is helpful.

And so this exercise is to first of all tune up your ears so you hear the label somebody else is using. And the goal of the exercise is for you to hear the label and feed it back in a reflection, to use exactly the word or phrasing that goes with that label to reflect state and then to offer a change. When you signal with your repeating the label back to them that you heard the label, that you heard their tone, that you are paying the price of connection, then people are more likely to follow you through a change, a change in direction, a change in labeling. So you say, "It sounds like that was infuriating. Maybe you're getting a lot of energy out of that: Infuriating. Energy. I've moved it.

I can't just say, "Wow, it sounds like you're getting a lot of energy out of that." Because the other person is going to say, "No, I'm infuriated." I have to show that I've heard the label to change the label. But what do I have to be doing? I have to be thinking as I am hearing, as I am reflecting, as I am genuinely giving my attention to the other person, some part of my awareness has to be saying, "What else could it be? Where else could I lead?" And then following through with that. It's hard to show that kind of respect in a bigger conversation if you are doing all the talking. It is hard to earn permission for somebody to follow your lead if you are doing all the talking. For many thousands of years now, people have talked about how to lead by asking questions.

And there have been famous teachers since Socrates, and maybe before in different kinds of traditions. Who led by asking questions. We're going to do a relatively simple exercise. You're just going to ask somebody about a choice point. Think of a choice point. Think of a problem. Think of a thing you would like to be able to solve or improve or carry out that you have some hesitation or doubt or obstacle about and then put it to the side and tell me about a time you learned something important.

And all I'm going to do as the questioner is be curious about how you learned, what you learned, and why it was important. But in the back of my mind, I know you need to work on that choice point. And so your brain is making a connection between the learning that was important and the problem you want to solve. And by asking curious questions, by staying present, and by reflecting back what I'm hearing before I answer ask the next question, I want to help my partner see their own experience in a new way so that they have an aha: "That's why that came to mind. That's how that helps me now. That's what I needed to know." Curiosity is irresistible. When people are curious about us, we want to stay in connection with them and we become very interested in following their lead because we believe that their lead will also help us feel better, help us be better, help us know things about ourselves that we didn't know before.

And the day ends with moving one step further because when you ask questions, you allow people to start shaping their own representation of something that you are helping them shape. Sometimes you will need them to share an outcome. You've developed a goal you have thought about a mental model that you are carrying and you will need to get that from your head to their head. Now any of those things are complicated. They include strategies and feelings and perceptions and awareness. And the best vehicle for communicating all those things is a story.

And so you tell a story using language that opens up an experience for the people you're listening to. We start: we say, "Think of a problem you're in the middle of." And then there are some story patterns that are suggested and you pick the one that seems right. It'll usually just be one that you think, "Oh, I don't have any stories, but I could tell you about this one time when..." And you tell the story and then you notice the impact that you have had. This can seem airy fairy. It seems airy fairy to just tell a story instead of analyzing something. And that is because our conscious minds are quite controlling. They like to feel like the conscious mind is running the show.

And your conscious mind is important. And the voice in your head that tells you stuff, it is an important part of you. But where do stories come from? If you just ask yourself, what story should I tell this person to help them with this problem? Well, it has to come from that vast data processor that is your brain. And your brain doesn't work by random. It works by connection.

Always by connection. So, anything you put in is going to trigger connections lighting up across your brain. And the story that comes to your mind is a story in connection with the problem you want to solve. Often after you tell a story, you go, "Oh, that's why that was the right story to tell." And sometimes you'll find allowing yourself to just tell the story that comes to mind gives you a very finely calibrated leadership where you have actually picked up on things just below the surface of your conscious awareness and you are feeding those things back through the story to get this really powerful connection that takes people through behaviors, through changes, through ups and downs, so that they come to a conclusion of the story that also mirrors this wrestling with a problem that needs to be solved. And you will move them towards the solution in a way that is hands-off, that it is not you giving them your solution but you leading them to find their own solution. And this is enormously important in all kinds of leadership. It's important in corporate leadership and management where you don't want to do everybody's job.

You do want to support people in being able to do their own best work. It's important in parenting where you telling your kid what to do is seldom effective. But you leading your child to think differently about a problem so that they come to their own solution can be very effective. And it can even be effective when it's not a child. Maybe you're working with a partner or a parent. Maybe you're working with a friend and you do not want to be responsible for telling them what to do with their lives, but you would like to lead them to deal with their problems more effectively.

So noticing the problem, paying attention, allowing a story to come and telling the story is often going to move them. Sometimes just a small wiggle, sometimes a big change. The final exercise is just to think about a piece of influence you want to have, somebody you want to influence or a situation you want to influence. Imagine that you have taken steps and you've done the influence. What feedback are you going to get? What feedback will you notice? What will the other person be feeling?

What will the others in the group be feeling? What will people who are aware of your influence think about it, say about it? How will you describe that influence, that situation? What will you say about it? And how will the day end differently because you did the thing you wanted to do, and you were successful at leading somebody else, and at leading yourself, through to the conclusion you wanted. That's day seven. I hope you'll be back for day eight, our final day on adaptation and learning.

I'm Linda Ferguson. Thanks for listening.