It didn’t all happen right away.

This week's story is from one of the "next generation" of NLP Comprehensive Coaches, Mark Andreas.  I think you'll find it charming and enlightening as I did.

Plus a few important time sensitive announcements and we'll be back next week with more on resourcing ourselves in these challenging times.

Cheers,
Tom Dotz

Word Count:  901          Reading Time:  3.60 Minutes

It didn’t all happen right away.

After my NLP practitioner training I began working for a wonderful wilderness therapy company based in Georgetown Colorado, the Monarch Center for Family Healing. My job as a field instructor was to lead groups of at risk teens in the backcountry for three weeks at a time, teaching them the hard skills of living in the woods while simultaneously facilitating their therapy. Most of the young adults sent to Monarch were not there of their own free will, and so naturally there was a lot of resistance, ranging from arguing the finer points of our safety rules, to refusing to move or speak at all!

I was eager to put my NLP to use in communicating with these wonderfully creative adolescents.

Now I’m good in a debate, and flaws in logic are difficult to get past me. So it was easy to point out to these kids when their resistance didn’t make sense, or when their arguments actually supported what I wanted from them. Sometimes this worked, but a lot of the time it didn’t. I’d spend an hour or more talking in circles and by the end we were just where we’d started. They just wouldn’t see what made sense!

I remember the time when I finally realized what was happening. It was the end of a long hike, and as we neared camp at the end of the day one of the students sat down and refused to go any farther. When I went back to see what was the matter she said, “It’s too much. I’m too weak. I can’t hike anymore.”

This was not a weak girl, and this was not the first time she’d stopped. All throughout the day she’d been refusing to go on. Every time the whole group had been forced to stop with her, sometimes for hours. Each time we talked and talked about how we had to stay together as a group; we could go any pace as long as we kept going; it was clear that she was quite strong enough to make the hike; blah blah blah…

I was about to go down the same road again by pointing out to her that she was quite capable of going on. Then I stopped. She was sitting slumped over in front of me, head bent, brooding eyes downcast. When I took this in without her words, it was suddenly obvious to me that her objections had nothing to do with hiking or not hiking. In my arguing and reasoning with her throughout the day, I had completely ignored what she was really communicating. If anything my “reason” had only served to harden her in a stance that she never meant to take in the first place.

“Can you look at me?” I asked. This time when our eyes met I said. “You know, I’ve seen that you’re very strong. We hiked some steep stuff today, and you were a trooper. I believe you could hike twice as far as today with a full pack on if you wanted to. So it’s clear to me that this isn’t about hiking; it’s about something else, isn’t it?”

She kicked a pinecone.

“I think something else is going on,” I said, “Is it about home?”

She nodded, “I miss my mom.”

We talked about that for a little bit, and I just listened to her. Pretty soon she got up and had no problem hiking the rest of the day.

If I had only responded to her words, we wouldn’t have gotten into camp before dark, but more importantly I never would have recognized what her real needs were. It seems obvious, but in this information age of print, e-mail, instant messaging, and text messaging, it is so easy to pay attention to the words alone and delete everything else.

Countless times later I was able to see past the words coming out of a kid’s mouth, recognizing through their actions and expressions when something much more important was going on. Often I still didn’t know what this was, but now I could ask. When I recognized and responded to this nonverbal communication, I’m sure it saved hours of useless debate, but above all it was so much more respectful of the person. What better way to say, “I’m paying attention to you.” than to recognize the conversation that, until now, no one realized was taking place?

Knowing that nonverbal communication exists is one thing, but in the NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner Immersion Courses, I learned so many details about nonverbal communication that most people are completely unaware of. For instance: How was her head bent? Where were her eyes downcast? What do these distinctions even mean? These subtleties are all clues to our internal experience. The most rewarding part of my NLP Immersion Courses was just that, the immersion – getting the chance to actually practice these new skills in a safe environment with other participants, through role-plays and small exercises. To this day in my life and NLP private practice, it is very empowering to be able to tune into this nonverbal communication, and then have the full range of NLP tools to know where to go from there!

*Mark Andreas is an NLP Master Practitioner with a private practice in Boulder, Colorado, offering individual NLP sessions to get the results you want in life: www.markandreas.com email

Announcements:

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Exciting New Seminar "NLP: The New Technology Of Change"  Facing change? Aren’t we all? During one of the “wildest rides” most of us can remember we are face-to-face with basic fears:   <Continue Reading Here>