Day 8: Adaptation and Improvement
NLP Canada Training, Linda Ferguson
https://nlpcanada.com/nlp-practitioner-video-series/day-8-adaptation-and-improvement/

Transcript

Have you heard that phrase: learning to learn? If you have, you've probably forgotten it as soon as it was said. It is the kind of thing that goes on websites or brochures, but makes very little impact. Because the truth is, when we're starting out at something, we think "if I need to learn it, somebody will teach me." And as we progress, we think "if it's important, I'll figure it out." And the problem with this is that both of these skip the part where we pay attention to our own strategies for learning from other people about the things that they can think or do that we would like to be able to think or do. It puts the onus on somebody else to teach us or it's just kind of vague about how adaptation is going to help us. Neuro-linguistic programming is primarily a model of how people adapt and change. And another word for that is learning.

And learning is not a bad word. It is a word that means we acquire skills, or acquire a new level of skill or information, that we can use to make our lives better, maybe to make a difference in a situation, maybe to make other people's lives better. And if you've made it this far to day eight, the final day of the NLP Canada Training NLP practitioner certification course, this is the day to reflect on what you have learned, what you want to learn, and how you will learn going forward. So the day starts by thinking about what's the best state for learning in?

Now the best state for learning alone is a flow state. A state where you are challenged to reach just a little bit beyond where you are now. If it's too far beyond, people get frustrated and they stop learning. If it's too easy, if you already know it all, then there's nothing to learn. The problem is to be just uncomfortable enough, just stretching hard enough. And this is hard to do in the presence of other people because when we are learning from other people or with other people, their edge might not be the same as our edge.

So I'm going to suggest that the best state for learning with other people is presence. And presence is that congruent state where your thoughts and your feelings are all engaged in that moment on doing whatever it is you're doing. And there's not a lot of room for thinking about past or future. Not a lot of room for thinking outside the frame.

So when you are present, you are present in the frame with other people. And that presence is what keeps you in that state where you are just at your edges and have no room for jumping around or distraction. So the day starts with going back to do something we haven't done before in the course. We have mapped out congruence. We have mapped out purpose but we have not mapped out presence.

So it starts with "think of a time you were fully present." And then as you do go back into a specific memory, build it up in your body, in your senses, in your eyes, in your ears. And then be curious as your coach guides you about all the different physical sensations that shift just a little when you are present, all of the signals you get in different parts of your body that let you know "I'm here." And then, what are the cues, the visual cues? Are you paying attention to a particular focus? Are you aware of colour? Are you aware of contrast? What is going on in your vision that lets you know you're locked in? You are present.

And what is going on in your ears? Your ears hold this really interesting place in your sensory capacities because they track internal and external and you can track all the way around you up and down. Sound can come from all different directions and make an impression on you. This isn't true with your eyes. You can only see what's in front of you, but you can hear what's behind you, beside you.

And so it is this enveloping sort of sensation that is very useful to pay attention to, particularly when the state you are mapping is presence. And then after we've spent some time with that, after we really are present, we're just going to use a little calibration game to explore what's going on in you when you are learning. So you think of a time when you were learning something and it felt good. It felt right. You felt like you were doing the right things. And you go back into that learning experience and then you're just really curious. Are you alone?

Are you with other people? Are you being taught or not taught? What happens in your body? What happens in your vision and your hearing? How close is it to presence? How is it different? Spend a little bit of time using the skills you've built up through the course to access a memory as if it's live.

And then shake that one off and you do the same thing with a time you were teaching and you were engaged in teaching or giving instructions and that felt good. Remembering always the takeaway from this course is that we pay way more attention to strengths, to things we desire, to things that are already working. So we can build on what works instead of hoping that by fixing something we arrive at somewhere better. So how are teaching and learning similar for you? How are they different? And the importance of this we pick up in the next section of the course when we do some exercises about how do we learn from other people and how do we teach other people. Because one of the great strengths of the human species is that we are able to share complicated, detailed information and skills from one person to another, from one generation to another.

And you inevitably will find yourself quite often wanting to pass information over to somebody else so strongly that they can make use of that information, or teach them how to do something that then they will be able to do independently of you. So, while you may think "I'm not a teacher," when you need to get somebody ready to cover for you on a big project, then you're the teacher. When you need somebody to help you out at home in a particular way, whether it is a family member or somebody you've hired, you become a teacher. In the exercise, you pick something you can teach in about five minutes over Zoom. We ask you to teach something that you can do that your partner will be able to do in just five minutes. Because the only way we know we have been successful at teaching is that the information arrives in the other person and can be used by the other person. If you say, "Do you understand?" and they say, "Yeah, I understand," you don't know if what they understand is what you think they should understand.

There can be distance. So the more abstract it is, the more difficult it is to tell whether or not your strategy for teaching has been successful. When you start by practicing tangible things, you can immediately see: I do something, then the person I teach tries it. Can they do it or not? Can they do it and get the same result? And you will find out by using perceptual positions. First to be solidly engaged in doing the thing you are demonstrating.

Solidly engaged in the knowledge it takes to do the thing that you have. Second position to move your awareness into the person you're teaching and notice what is getting through. If you are demonstrating a physical skill, when they try it, you imagine being in their body to figure out exactly where it's going right or maybe it needs correction. Third position to check on the relationship. Is this going well? Are we still connected? Remember that we started with a teaching state and a learning state.

Those states have to interact. If I am learning from you, your teaching state has to in some way match my learning state. We have to be able to figure out that alignment and those shifts. And so it becomes really important that we get that 'observing relationship' that we have just done and pull it into this exercise.

So we can say from third position: is the relationship okay? Are they both paying attention? Are they paying attention to each other? What's going on? And we cycle through that a few times until your partner can do the thing you're teaching them to do or until you can do the thing your partner is teaching you to do.

Now, there's all kinds of things you might want to teach and learn that you won't be able to do in a few minutes on screen. That's true. So we try and take you outside of this particular box by asking you to work with a partner. Find something they can do that you would like to be able to do and then just focus your attention on the state that triggers them to do that thing.

So whether it is how they do public speaking, how they run a meeting, how they do some technical skill, how they do something at home, how they hold their temper with their three-year-old, it doesn't matter what it is, but you're going to do an exercise that involves having them become more self-aware of how they do that. Not just in terms of these are the steps I take, but in terms of there is something in the external situation that tells me it's time to do this thing. When it does, I go into this state. We'll call it X. I go into X. And when I am in X, I am ready to take the first behaviors towards doing this thing I want to do. As you learn this, you're going to learn that state X.

You are going to watch your partner go into it. You are going to match and mirror with your body, with your voice, with your words. You're going to establish an anchor word, a trigger word, so that when you say the word, they go into that state. And you're going to start building the idea, in you and in them, that the state is related to the behaviours. It drives the behaviours and the behaviours drive the accomplishment of this thing that they can do. That's important for you. It's important for them.

It's where we start understanding really inside, in practical ways in our daily lives, how understanding our state and being able to shift to useful states makes everything else easier. When the state is appropriate to the behaviour, there is no friction. We move through our day much better than when we are trying to do something that requires a relaxed focus when we're a little too uptight. Something that requires focus when we are distracted. And you'll become aware, over and over, of when things are going well, it's because I am in the right state to be doing the thing I want to do. When things are not going well, I'm in the wrong state. And if I'm trying to teach somebody, I need to teach them the state that will drive the behaviours.

And if I'm trying to learn from somebody, I need to observe their states because I need to do what they do in the state in which they do it to do it the same way with the same complicated timings and abilities to get the same result. Now when we come back after another break to think about framing and language, we are only going to think about one thing. It is a very big exercise. It is your chance to coach somebody for half an hour to 45 minutes.

So, long enough to really be engaged in a coaching process rather than in a piece of a coaching process. The question is, what have you learned that will serve your purpose for taking this course? And the exercise starts out by saying people have different reasons. Here are three. They want to feel better. They want to do something better. They want to do something better with other people.

They want a better connection. What's the thing you want? Did you want to change the way you feel? Did they want to change their behaviour? And people will tell you what they want and your partner says, I want this thing and you say, right? NLP is a model of patterns. First, we're going to practice the pattern with something that is less important.

And then when we have established a pattern between us of working through, then we'll go back to the thing that is most important. Should I say that again? Start with an example that is less important and then when you have an established way of working, an established pattern, established trust, then go back and work on the thing that is more important. In this case, do not start with the most important thing. The exercise itself is relatively simple. You say, "What did you want to learn? What have we done in class that helps you with that thing you wanted to learn?

What specific exercises have we done that help you learn that thing you wanted to learn so that you can accomplish your big picture goal? And then again, patterning, chunk back up. What else have you learned? And people say, "Well, I've learned state management." Great. What exercises have you learned in state management that will help you achieve this particular outcome? People will say, "Well, I learned state mapping and that's been great and I learned stop the world." Okay, so that gives us two. It's not good enough to say, "Yeah, the course taught me some state management" if you don't know which techniques or exercises are going to give you the ability to manage your state better.

And what's kind of right in the centre of this frame, so that it's maybe hard to see because it's right in the centre, is the idea that these are skills and if you want to build them, you will have to practice them. Not just do them in class once. That's a little bit of practice. It opens the door. It allows you to answer the questions in this exercise, but it won't be enough to do more. You have to identify what part of the course will I practice? How will I practice it?

Then you take a little reflection break, come back and you say, "Okay, but your your big reason for taking the course was different." And then you go through the same process again with your real reason, your big reason, the thing you have said is the more important reason. Now, what this has given you time to do is to develop a little extended rapport with your coach, to understand where the next questions are going to lead you so that you don't feel caught out. You don't feel that you are stumbling at all and you can really focus 100% of your attention on okay, I want to do this. Here's something I learned that will help me. Here is where in the course I learned it. Here's something else I learned that will help. Because all of these things are big.

It's not a single stream. It is lots and lots of different threads that you're going to pull on to accomplish these bigger goals. So, this is called chunking down. Chunking down in NLP and psychology in general just means becoming more specific. Putting things under the microscope, talking about just one thing at a time. Chunking up means talking at the level of generalities or of patterns or of abstract concepts.

So up here is abstract. Can't really put your senses around it. It is a pattern. So there's a lot of different pieces. As we chunk down, we chunk down to what you are seeing and hearing and feeling. And it's a big exercise. As you are coaching that exercise, you will find that sometimes you are in sync: you understand what's important to your coaching partner.

And sometimes you are going to ask them something, to become more specific about something, before they're ready. They may not be ready because they haven't thought it through. They may not be ready because you, in that moment, are not in that kind of rapport where they will follow your lead to chunk down. The best learning is not to get it right every time because that's likely to be a function of having been in a course for eight days together, that you give each other permission automatically. It is better if you have some rough spots, because that reminds you that in real life, in your life, whenever you use these techniques you are guessing. Do I have permission for this? Let me try it.

If I try it and they don't follow my lead, I have to build more rapport and permission. I have to go back up to more general conversation until I understand where the common ground is. And then I have to make another guess at how specific can we get and stay together. And it's going to keep you more alert, more on your toes, if you are aware you are always making a guess. It might be an expert gambling instead of a novice, but still you're never going to get it right all of the time or you're never going to get it 100% right all of the time.

And so you want to always build in this idea of checking on the rapport, of observing the relationship, and of noticing when something you ask changes the level of connection and how it changes it. Having set up the idea that the way you learn skills is to practice them, and practice means not just doing them, it means doing them with attention, noticing results, getting feedback, and doing them again. So you can't practice coaching within a coaching session. That is performance. That is the equivalent of being on the playing field. What you need is to come back onto the practice field where you do the drills. And this isn't true just for NLP.

This is true for any skill. The way you get better at it is to practice it with intention and attention. And so for the last session of the course, the last segment of the day, we come back to intention and we think about your intention to practice. And we start with a calibration that kind of tests the idea that yeah, if it's good, you'll practice it. We say, what's one thing you've learned that you've used and go into an experience where you used it. Find out what you were seeing, hearing, and feeling. What changes in you?

Things that are hard to describe in words, but what is the whole experience when you are using something you learned in the course? And then something you learned in the course, you maybe liked it. It's not that you didn't learn it. It's not that it you didn't understand. It might be something you didn't understand.

But there will be things in this course that you learned that you do not practice consciously. Maybe you've even used it unconsciously. That happens all the time. But we're asking about think of something you have not consciously used outside of the classroom. And as you think about doing that exercise, what do you notice in you? What's different? And then you make a little plan.

How am I going to practice? Now, it's not you have to practice the things you're not going to practice. It's also not it's okay to only practice the things you like practicing. The more you like it, the more you're probably getting it right. The more you're getting it right, the less you are learning. It is an unfortunate fact of learning science that we learn best through struggle.

So, how are you going to take some of these principles and techniques and ideas, put them to work, notice what happens, make a decision about what to try the next time, and repeat. And then you're going to design a specific practice, a session where you would practice one of these things. Not just coming back to visit me to visit NLP Canada Training, which you are welcome to do. All practitioners are welcome at all practitioner trainings.

So you can come back and practice that way. But there's too long in between. What are you going to do next week to make sure that the learning stays fresh and useful and grows? And you design a little practice session and then we mentally rehearse doing it because again we want to end on that note: when we imagine what we want in the future in detail, that includes what we will see and hear and feel that has layers of meaning, layers of information. When we make that mental rehearsal vivid, we make it much more likely that we will carry it out. And then we will close with a circle of appreciation where participants express what they have appreciated about other participants who've worked with them in the course. Not about the teachers, not about the course, it's not that.

It's what did you learn from the individual people you worked with and we end with this lovely collective note of learning and appreciation. It's a great place to land. I hope that if you're watching this, you will come out, you will register and take the course and with that full experience behind you, have that experience of our closing circle. I'm Linda at NLP Canada Training.