Transcript NEURO LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING - THE HISTORY AND USE OF NLP IN COACHING Podcast Interview by Robert Holmes with Chris Collingwood
Male Voice:
This is the Coach Mentor Podcast proudly brought to you by Frazer Holmes and Associates making the most of your greatest asset. This podcast covers a wide range of topics related to the coaching industry. Interviews with industry leaders, coaching experts and exploring areas of expertise closely related to the coaching industry. Here's your host Robert Holmes.
RH:
Hi and welcome to the coaching mentor podcast. Today’s episode is entitled, “Neuro Linguistic Programming. The history and use of NLP in coaching.” We’ll be exploring this vast field known as NLP with Chris Collingwood – CEO and founder of Inspirative. Chris and his wife Jules are experts in corporate and personal change management. Leaders in training for NLP in Australia. Chris was personally trained by the founders of NLP – Richard Bandler and John Grinder in 1979, and his wife Jewel was in 1996. He’s also a principle in Edit Executive Solutions and Management Consultancy that specializes in leadership and management training. They do modelling the top performers, cultural development and corporate change. Chris has over 20 years of experience in coaching, consulting and leading seminars in Australia and the US. He holds a diploma in training and assessments systems, a degree in Psychology, a graduate certificate in Neuro Linguistic Programming and a master’s degree in Applied Science Social Ecology. Chris’s passion is doing one to one work with people designing courses and accreditation and the training of the corporate consultants and executive coaches. Wow! Now to the interview. Hi Chris!
CC:
Hi! How are you Robert?
RH:
I’m well indeed. I’ve been looking forward to this interview.
CC:
Thank you.
RH:
Before we get into the guts of what we want to talk about – the history and the current practices in NLP, I wonder if we could just cover your own journey into the coaching world. Did that start with NLP?
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CC:
Yes, it did. Look, I hadn’t even finished my original NLP training when I was approached by a GP. She asked me where my private practice was, assuming that I was already doing one on one work with people. A few months later, after I finished my training I started working out of the doctor’s surgery. Now, at the time, I was operating out the misunderstanding that NLP was a therapy. So I started working doing therapeutic work and that was in late 1981. Of course NLP is not a therapy, that’s just one application of NLP. Now of course, I do more coaching work in recent years and for me the type of work I do, one on one personal change work, it’s a continuum from therapeutic through to coaching.
RH:
All right. Maybe that’s a good place just to dig in and ask about the difference between those two things. It’s not a therapeutic practice; it’s a series of tools. Can we unpack that a little bit?
CC:
Sure. Well, if you ask what NLP actually is – it’s a methodology for taking experts and studying expertise and expert behaviour and building models. So we can actually spend time with an expert and capture what they do, find a way of describing it, or what we call coding it, and that’s building a model and transferring those skills to other people. In the original work, the early models of NLP that Bandler and Grinder studied with therapists. Of course NLP can be applied to just about any area of expertise, so there are multiple models, including models for coaching, models for – look even for things like digging up coal we did a very interesting project at a coal mine where we modelled the top excavators – excavator operators, and built a model for digging out dirt and digging out coal – an expert model for doing that. So it’s very, very broad in its application. For me, coaching is more focusing on assisting the person to find their own solutions. Its outcome oriented, its outcome focused whereas therapeutic work tends to be something that delves more into a person’s past and why a person is the way they are and so on. Really, the application of NLP to personal change work fits far better with a coaching model in that we don’t really need to work with the past. We don’t really care about the past. We’re not interested in why this person is the way they are. We don’t find that useful. NLP when applied in a coaching context is far more useful in assisting a person to develop the resources they need to solve their everyday problems and to help them to achieve the outcomes that they have. We’re more interested in asking a person what they’re doing something for, what’s the intention for a particular behaviour or an intention they have for a particular outcome rather than looking for insight.
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One of the problems with therapy is that it has been very insight-oriented. People can spend years exploring and finding out why they are the way they are and it doesn’t necessarily have much impact on creating change at all. RH:
Do you think one of the reasons that it slipped into therapeutic practice was maybe the early modelling – I don’t know the history of NLP well enough, but didn’t Grinder and Bandler sort of early model on Milton Erickson or someone?
CC:
Yes, they did.
RH:
Right.
CC:
Milton Erickson was the third major model and the first three models were all therapists.
RH:
Right, I see.
CC:
If we start with the first, Richard Bandler had picked up skills doing Gestalt Therapy. Gestalt therapy was started by Fritz Perls – it’s a former humanistic psychology. The first model came through John Grinder modelling Richard doing gestalt therapy. The second model, both Bandler and Grinder (Richard and John) they modelled Virginia Satir, who was one of the leading family therapists at the time. Then they were very fortunate to be introduced to the psychologist Milton Erickson. Erickson had already created quite a revolution in the area of hypnosis. His work being distinctly different to traditional hypnosis. They modelled Milton Erickson and the man was absolutely brilliant. They found some absolutely superb patterns assisting people to change, for engaging a person’s unconscious mind and working with a person indirectly. They had quite an impact on NLP. A lot of the early models were therapeutic in nature and really NLP took off very, very quickly, and they started teaching NLP theory early on. A lot the work was really therapeutic in nature at the beginning of the application and that’s what got out into the world for the first 10-15 years.
RH:
Then what we want to say is really it’s the modelling of behaviour and therefore it’s a tool. It’s a tool for modelling. It’s a tool for changing behaviour. I think one of the areas I’d just like to sort of dig into there, a phrase used was ‘content free’ and a friend of ours who we mutually share is John Sautelle, who I’m going to be interviewing on the program, one of the phrases he likes to use is ‘listening off the top’. Could you sort of unpack that a little bit – coaching the pattern not the content?
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CC:
Yes. The very first model was a linguistic model called the Meta model. Now, what was revolutionary about that model was rather than having a set number of questions, you ask a person about the actual content of their experience. The question and sounds are based on the form of the person’s language and grammar. For example, in a business context if a person says, “We can’t increase production.” A useful question would be to tackle the noun ‘production’ to unpack that, so we might ask, “What production specifically?” or a coaching context person says, “I’m having difficulty with my manager.” We would go for the verb difficulty. “You’re having a difficulty with your manager. How specifically?” The form of a person’s sentences tells you what question to ask to get high grade information, so you’re responding to the actual form rather than getting into the story that person actually had.
RH:
What’s the reason that we’re doing that? We’re doing that because that’s a subconscious cue. That’s a cue to what’s really going on?
CC:
What we’re doing it for is to get higher grade information. The Meta model itself is working with the patterns of a person’s language to get greatest specificity, so that is just one model for getting more detailed specific information and really it is finding the critical information. When you consider that often people speak in a very fluffy abstract way so you hear this with politicians, you hear this with managers. So if I said something like, ‘well considering the significant challenges that have being happening to the Australian economy with the global financial crisis I want to once again reassure all Australians that we’re taking the necessary steps to see ourselves through that crises so that we can continue to create greater wealth for all Australians. Now, that is so fluffy. Somebody trained in the meta model could, or let’s say a journalist could ask a whole series of questions to start unpacking that and get more specific information. I can give a therapeutic example, a person says, “My father scares me.” “Scaring you how specifically?” this person might say, “He’s looks at me in a particular way.” “Well, how specifically is he looking at you?” It may turn out that it’s a particular facial expression, his eyebrows go up let’s say, and then he or she feels scared. We now have actually unpacked – we’ve found through asking those questions what are the cues in father’s behaviour that trigger the particular emotional response – getting scared. By applying this particular linguistic tool which works on the form, the grammar, the person’s language we can often then find what are the behavioural cues – there could be facial expressions, it could be something in a person’s voice, it could be how they touch, whatever the cues are that are triggering the particular response.
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In a management context, if we use this vague statement such as ‘look we can’t increase production’, so we found what production is by asking the question, we might go, “What stops us from increasing production?” So I’m picking up on another piece of grammar in that sentence, can’t. “What stops us?” They might say, “The unions.” Now, I can then ask, “How specifically are the unions stopping us from increasing production?” So I can actually unpack the real problem that’s driving the situation very quickly because I’m operating off the grammars that tell you what questions to ask to find that out. RH:
Using the Meta model
CC:
Yes. The first model itself was a process oriented model. It was working with patterns of language and from that they then, through the modelling process, they then, as I said earlier, these three therapists, they then built a series of models which are all attending to patterns. The form of how people communicate rather than the actual content story.
RH:
Absolutely fascinating. Somewhere in the middle of that you gave us the story or began to tell the story of some high performance sort of digging or mining people. Then taking those modelling tools and applying them in a business context, can we go back to that story and just learn a little bit more about how you modelled that?
CC:
Okay. It’s really a form of what we called implicit learning. Keep in mind two ways of learning are explicitly and implicitly. Our education system is primarily an explicit form of education. Implicit learning, modelling is a form of implicit learning. What we in effect do, what I did myself with a couple of other consultants, we spent time in the cab with the four high performers in terms of excavator operation – they call them diggers. Basically, it was via state, what we call a know nothing state where I’m actually out to take in what the person’s doing without any analysis at that time until I can actually reproduce the same skill. This is the way we actually learnt as children. Children are very very good at modelling. Unfortunately, a lot of us as we become adults do less modelling and in fact often have less access to that particular skill. This actually involves the mirror of neurons if we get technical about it. Monkey see, monkey do. So via this state I can actually feel all the movements in my own body that the operators are making. In the modelling I’m actually capturing how the person’s placing their attention, how their actually driving the machine and so on, until I can actually reproduce that skill and then I make it explicit and conscious and start unpack what are the component patterns that make up the particular skill. Once we have that, we then test that out and once it’s been tested, what we did is we designed a coaching
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program where we sat in the cabs with the other performers - the average and the poor performer at excavator operation and coached them in adjusting their behaviour changing their pattern so they could actually dig in the same way. People think oh how could there be that much difference in performance in how a person digs up dirt of digs up coal. It can be quite dramatic. In fact, the top operator we modelled out how he planned the dig. He would look at the geophysics for the coal seam because he know where the coal seam was he would project that image out on to the coal and he would also then plan where to start to pull out the coal as efficiently as possible. Even the way he swung the bucket, keep in mind these buckets will pick up between sixty and eighty of material in every scoop. It was an incredibly efficient way. How he communicated with the truckies, it was backing the truckies and guiding them in and so on. There were a number of patterns that he used and we were able to make those explicit and then build a coaching program to transfer those particular skills. Now that’s just one example – we’ve been modelling all sorts of people… RH:
Sorry to interrupt, what sort of improvements then? We’re talking about taking the top four guys in a hard coal mining environment and we’re modelling them, we know nothing about a mining or digging or anything, we’ve developed a coaching program and we’ve now gone to the lower performing people in the company with that skill set and we’ve created an improvement. What sort of improvements?
CC:
We got a 84% increase in productivity.
RH:
Absolutely incredible.
CC:
That had an impact in terms of millions of dollars per annum.
RH:
Of course. Before we go to any other examples because I’d love to hear another couple of examples there, you used the terms implicit and explicit. Are they analogies for subconscious and conscious or do you mean something else?
CC:
They’re not exact fit but they’re close. For example, implicit learning we are unconsciously picking up on the skill. Now whereas explicit, we have a conscious of awareness of the information that we’re learning at the time. For example, we all have had experiences as part of being human of implicit learning. We often do things that we aren’t necessarily that conscious off, that we actually picked up through association with other people: particularly mannerisms for example. You see children they’ve modelled mannerisms of mother and father, voice tonality patterns and so on and so forth. Whereas in explicit learning it’s really classroom learning where information is
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consciously attended to. Where we say this is material to be learned and the person’s taking through the material as if it’s conscious activity. We are, as we say, deeply organized to be able to do implicit learning and it does involves the mirror of neuron systems and something called micro muscle activation and I won’t go into the details on that. But anyway, we are hard wired to be able to implicitly learn. RH:
Well the only reason I raise it, I’m trying to think of the book where I read the research of George Miller and he’s attentional work – the seven items of attention plus or minus two. I want to say Daniel Goldman but I can’t be sure that it was his book.
CC:
It was a simple paper written by George A Miller. Now it was called “The magic number 7 plus or minus 2” and that came out in the late 50’s. Miller was part of the whole cognitive revolution the shift away from behaviours into cognitive psychology, a very important figure in cognitive psychology, George Miller. Now the whole idea of plus and minus 2 is our attention is limited between 5 and 9 chunks. You may have heard of the term working memory or short term memory and long term memory?
RH:
Yes.
CC:
It used to refer to short term memory. It’s now called working memory. Our working memory can only hold between 5 or 9 chunks of attention. If I gave you 8 digits: 9,6,9,8,5,6,1,1. Now that’s very difficult to hold especially a phone number. It was an old phone number, no longer exists. But anyway, that’s fairly hard to hold. But what we do, we break it up into chunks to hold it in our conscious attention or our working memory. If I say 96 98 56 11, it’s a lot easier to remember. It’s now being chunked into four groupings of two and is within the limits of our 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of attention. In terms of the conscious learning is far easier to remember – 96 98 56 11. Now because I know about chunking, I’ve already set up some voice cubes in just my tonality to help me remember that. So if I go (duhduh … duhduh … duhduh… duhduh…) that’s now marked out as 96 98 56 11. It makes it easy to remember. That then goes into long term memory and now the listener should have easy access to that old telephone number. Our conscious attention is limited. In terms of explicit learning, when we’re learning explicitly, the information needs to be grouped within 5 to 9 chunks. It even gets a little bit more sophisticated than that. So modern work, if we’re think of the work of Professor John Sweller, who was at the University of New South Wales in the school of education. He and colleagues in a university in Holland, they have developed an
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extension of that work and it’s called, “cognitive load theory.” When you are teaching a child in algebra, they got the normal limits like all of us – of 7 plus or minus 2 chunks of working memory. However, what they discovered that every chunk that you need to hold consciously that needs to be related to another chunk in conscious attention eats up an extra slot of available attention. Whenever learning something novel, something new, not only are we limited to between 5 and 9 chunks of attention. However, the number of items that we need to hold consciously, and the items that are related to each other, each relationship, eats up a chunk of attention, so a child may only have in actual practice, let’s say 3 chunks of attention available for learning algebra which becomes an issue in teaching a child algebra. The skilled teacher would go for let’s say one or two chunks of information and make sure that is encoded and goes in long term memory first. Once it’s a long term memory it frees up that slot of attention into subconsciousness. That is why you might have some wrote learning at the beginning of, let’s say, teaching some math. Then that frees up the attention so they can start to actually hold in conscious attention the relationships between different elements. This is some of the theory that’s behind explicit learning and I might say that the work that John Sweller has done is absolutely superb. RH:
John Sweller’s book, for listeners who may be interested in it, is called Instructional Design in Technical Areas or something like that - surely you’ll be able to find it on Amazon, UNSW School of Education. The story of the men in the mining equipment reminds me of the fireman who often think that they’re making decisions intuitively but they’re actually accessing the subconscious programs. They’re accessing the intuitive memory if you like that they have with the hundreds of buildings that they walked into that have been on fire. That’s where modelling – you can get around that limitation because you’re observing their behaviour, you’re observing what they do for a living and they don’t have to explain what they’re doing to you. You can just watch them.
CC:
That’s right. We watch them in what we call a modelling state or a ‘know nothing’ state. The idea here is we come to the party without any preconceived ideas. A very good example of that which is similar to that fireman story, Jules – my partner and I, we had this wonderful opportunity of modelling a very successful derivatives trader. Now, this man had intuitions about taking a trade. It would feel right to take a particular trade and when he did that, when he followed his intuition, he had very good results. The problem he had is that the intuitions did not fit with his conscious understanding of the particular patterns that he was consciously attending to when looking at real time systems, looking at charts for a particular instrument he’s trading. He wanted to find out what he
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was actually responding to? What was behind the intuition? Now, we found out what it was there was particular pattern that he was responding to unconsciously and that would trigger the intuition or the signal to take a particular trade. Now, where that came from, he had spent 30 years trading. He was very experienced, very successful trader and he had seen thousands of charts. In fact the particular instruments he traded in, he had actually looked back over those charts historically right back in time as far as they had information for those particular trading instruments. He had thousands of representations at the unconscious level of trading patterns. As a result, his unconscious mind was able to detect the particular pattern that was significant and then give him the signal to take a trade. By the way, he also used to get a signal not to take a trade and he also had another internal response that let him know he needed more information. But anyway we spent time in the modelling state with this particular gentlemen while he was trading and were able to pick up on what he was responding to. As a result, he then had an explicit model where he actually had a pattern now explicit for what he was actually trading. Then as a result to that, he was still able to develop and refine his own model and in fact he developed an entire trading system based on what we found which he actually teaches. He now lives overseas. I suspect that he couldn’t afford from a tax point of view to stay in Australia. He has a very different tax environment now. By making it explicit, he now has a conscious understanding of what he’s responding to. He can also explicitly and consciously work it through mathematically if he has any doubts at all. He might have the signal but he can actually refer to it and do further analysis at a conscious level if he chooses to. RH:
You haven’t just done worked with derivatives traders though. My understanding is that you’ve also then taken that to stock market trading and perhaps also currency trading?
CC:
Yes. Now, about 3 years ago I was very fortunate spend time with a very successful stock trader. He was operating from some different patterns that were very specific and relevant to a particular type of stock. He was trading resources – resource stocks. The model that we developed from spending time modelling him, applied specifically to that was quite different to the other model. I successfully used that model for a 5 month period. Now it’s going to sound fairly outrageous but I was returning 86% per month trading and using those particular patterns. Now those patterns pertained under very specific conditions and then the market changed and those patterns are no longer appropriate. So actually then shifted my attention to doing another modelling project for a currency trader which I’m still doing
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but we’re actually developing a model at the moment for currency trading. But those were just examples. There are many things you could do with modelling. We we’re very fortunate – Jules and I, we were invited to model the General Manager of the Asian Division of an Australian Multi National a number of years ago. This gentlemen, the particular area they were interested in – there were two areas: one was his management skills. He was an absolute superb manager – one of the best managers I have ever met. His team were highly motivated they had a lot of intrinsic motivation – self-motivation. They would have walked over hot coals for this man. The other area of expertise that we modelled was the ability to put together teams for negotiation. They were particularly adept at doing high level joint venture project negotiation in Asia, and so we built two models: one, in terms of some of his management patterns – his patterns of communication in managing people and the patterns he used in his negotiation for that company. RH:
Really fantastic warning though that you just gave there is about specificity. I can see how that relates to derivatives trading or resource trading, say currency trading well. So you made 86% return in a month for 5 – Ooo – the market changes – different. Did those warnings about specificity also apply to the kind of modelling that you did with this particular GM – his particular kind of negotiation skills, did it create a model that was really only applicable in a multi-national situation or could it be more broadly used?
CC:
In his case, the model is a great model for managers in general. Now, of course there are other factors to take into account. You have to have a corporate culture that supports that type of management. He had a management style and he had particular patterns as part of his style that worked very well in terms of creating intrinsic motivation on behalf of the people who reported to him – his managers, in a way he reversed the whole pyramid. He actually operated as if he’s in customer service to his managers and they in turn act as if their managers were their customers. Now for example, I’ve taken some of the model we have from that gentleman plus a couple of other models we have for managers on a recent consultant job we’ve been doing, we’ve been building that in with the managers but we’ve also using it as a tool to lever change in the actual culture of a particular organization – our client organization. I’ll give you one example, we’ve worked with call center for an organization where we’ve had a dramatic increase in their performance. We took the top performers there. We call them internal consultants but they’re basically sales people. We built a model that pertains for the type of selling they do, to the particular type of customers that they have. What we needed to do when we brought the model in, we had to make an intervention in the culture of the organization so that the culture would support the
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increase in the productivity and the performance of their internal sales consultants. If we hadn’t have done that, sure we would had an improvement but improvement would probably have waned off after over a period of time. You’ve got to have a supportive culture. But the upside is we also have now some models that are very good for initiating and maintaining cultural change inside organizations. Sometimes you can’t just do a modelling project, transfer the skills. Sometimes you need to work with the context within which people are working, the culture of the organization itself and that needs to be changed too sometimes. RH:
Absolutely critical. We’ve moved from taking the experts in that call center, capturing the information of what they do, describing it, building the training. But then we have to come in corporately and work on the overall culture. The coaching isn’t just NLP modelling now were talking change management as well. That’s a critical addition.
CC:
Absolutely! Part of the tools that we use for initiating culture change of course is coaching. For example, this particular organization I was thinking about… Sure we build a model, for top performers in terms of doing internal consultant work, and we train the model, but we then build in a coaching program, we train the managers and the supervisors on how the coach the sales model, and then we do some further coaching for them making sure that they were effectively coaching the sales staff so that the actual changes and the new patterns that we want the sales staff to use became a normal part of everyday life. If we haven’t done with the coaching there’s a high probability that the performance will drop off after a while. Now, we did this over a year ago and they’re still getting better results every month. Because it’s now self-replicating in a way because of the coaching program that was built in and the culture change that was built in at the same time as well.
RH:
Just to summarize what we’ve come from we’ve looked at the original sort of form of NLP. It was modelled on sort of a therapeutic model – some gestalt therapy. We’ve talked a lot about modelling through the middle there. I guess somewhere that’s called classic NLP if you like. There’s been recently a shift I’ve noticed a new language if you like, calling itself new code NLP to people who aren’t sort of on the inside of the NLP world can you help us understand what shift has taken place?
CC:
Sure. The original NLP as developed by Bandler and Grinder we refer to as the classic code, as the original coding. Now, John Grinder himself, in his book, “Whispering the Wind” points out that they were patterns that both he and Bandler had that were part of their behaviour that they weren’t conscious of. There are patterns that they carried implicitly. In the original coding of NLP some of these key patterns were not built in to
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the material. As a result, the original NLP – keep in mind also you’ve got trainers who have trained trainers who’ve trained trainers, so you’ve kind of got this Chinese whispers effect were you’ve got trainers 5 or 6 layers away from the originators. As a result, the current’s state of play with most NLP, of what we referred to the classic code, have key pieces missing that were part of Bandler and Grinders make up anyway. Grinder, based on some of the problems he had and some of the feedback he got from the world and from people training NLP in terms of their performance and some of the problems they were having, starting back in the early 80’s he took another look in NLP and began the process of recoding it and this is what became the new code. It originally began as recoding process with his wife at the time Judith DeLozier and then with his new wife who he has now been married to for 25 years, Carmen Bostic St. Clair. They’ve developed a re-coding of NLP which is called the new code of NLP that actually has built in some of the key patterns that were part of Grinder’s behaviour that was missing from the original coding and it really is a significant difference between the old material of the classic code and the new. RH:
You mentioned that Grinder himself was sort of facing some feedback from the market. We’ve got Chinese whispers, we’ve got trainers training trainers, he himself began to realize, “Wait a minute, NLP as its being called in the field is actually not what I set out to introduce.”
CC:
What he often refers to, a lot of what’s told out there, it often refers trainers as trainers who purport to be teaching NLP, because when he sees some of their teaching it’s not even recognizable in his world as what he and Bandler intended to teach from the beginning.
RH:
It would be very helpful. A lot of our listeners come from a business background or are part of counselling, consulting. They may not have entered in on NLP training. They may be looking at getting training and I’d love to promote your upcoming conferences and graduate certificate, we’ll do that in the end. But if they are trying to tell real from not real, what are some of the giveaways?
CC:
Okay. Some of the giveaways in terms of application, let’s say coaching, content free consultant or content free coaching. Someone who is skilled in NLP, especially if they’re trained in the new code, coaching somebody will not delve into the person’s story, they’re working purely on the level of pattern. For example I worked some of yesterday doing some coaching and it’s a business context, and I didn’t need to go into and have all the content about the business and the people, and who said what to whom. Instead we were working with his outcomes, purely a process level. So we had him consider
Coach Mentor Podcast Transcript – Episode 4: Chris Collingwood Neuro Linguistic Programming – The history and use of NLP in coaching
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what he wanted and I talked him through how to represent that in a way to actually engage his unconscious mind, having considered the intention for his outcome, I had him consider the context, so we worked purely at the level of process – he knows the content, I don’t need to know the content. One of markers of a skilled NLP coach and particularly if they’ve been trained in the new code approach, they’re working at the level of form and they’re not getting caught up in the story. Now this offers some protections for the coach. If I don’t know the content, if the person’s not telling me the actual story – their actual story, I can’t have the illusion of thinking that I understand them whereas before, if somebody says, “My father scares me” working with the form – scares you how specifically, he looks at me in a certain way, how he’s looking at you, OK his eyebrows lift up – we’re getting the process – the pattern there. Whereas somebody’s working with content might say, “My father scares me,” “Oh, that’s terrible. Does he abuse you?” Now that’s an extreme example. I’m sure many coaches would not go that far but that’s a content imposition on the client where the coach is hallucinating what that means rather than actually working with the form. One of the key things is its content free. It’s still a little difficult for people to actually detect whether something’s working purely on the level of process or the content in that our culture so content laden that it tends to be a fairly changing distinction for a person to make. We’ve certainly found that out there in the world. That’s one marker. Two, with the new code we tend to focus more through working with state than working with behaviour. This person has a behaviour they want to change, one way to change it is to mentally rehearse alternative behaviour that applies in the context where the old habit used to occur, that’s one way of going about it - that’s more of the classic code approach. With the new code, we would help the person to build let’s say a high performance state that contains a number of different choices in terms of how they could respond. For example, if I’m working with somebody in a negotiation context I could actually … using a classic code approach I might mentally rehearse them going through an alternative behaviour in that context. With the new code, we would help them build a high performance state which they would simply then drop into that context. Now as a result, they go into the next negotiation they’re doing. They would find themselves with new behaviours there automatically. The new behaviours are provided by the state. Now the interesting thing is, let’s say the following week they go into another negotiation – this is a different person, another negotiation. They may find themselves with some completely different behaviours that are fully available in that situation. Coach Mentor Podcast Transcript – Episode 4: Chris Collingwood Neuro Linguistic Programming – The history and use of NLP in coaching
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In other words, the new code approach – because we’re working with states and performance states, it tends to be generative where people end up with a range of new choices of behaviour rather than working just at the level behaviour where you’re swapping one behaviour for another, if that makes sense. RH:
Absolutely!
CC:
So someone who’s well trained in NLP, especially if their new code of trained will probably going to be working more with state than with behaviour. And how else would you know? I think the biggest distinctions is that a person doesn’t get caught up in the story and their not promoting philosophy either. I notice a lot of systems people say, tell people what they should think. So one of the key ideas with the new code whether it’s in a coaching context or a consulting context, we’re creating a context where the client finds their own solutions. That way they take ownership of the solution. If I tell somebody how they should behave or what they should do, if I was to do that it’s a major to service to the client. But if I can create a context where the person taps into their own resources and finds their own solution then they have full ownership of that and they can apply that in their lives. Now one of the other differences you find between what I consider somebody’s who is well trained in NLP and somebody who isn’t and once again you will see this distinction when you compare the classic NLP with the new code is in term of how it’s taught. If a person is taught in a training, in a scripted format – here’s the script and follow the script, that’s definitely classic code and it’ very limited. The way we teach is we teach the first principle. People are learning the underlying patterns and they can actually use NLP in their own words. They don’t have to follow the script. So one of the ways that I would – that’s another way you can tell if somebody’s properly trained in NLP or not, if they’re doing something in a highly scripted way you know they’ve got NLP in a very limited way.
RH:
I mean that’s powerful right there. That one definition has helped me straight away with one particular skill. The other thing that pops into mind is the teaching of anchoring and changing a physiology. Is that part of new code or not?
CC:
Well its part of classic code as well. However, in the new code a lot of new code is oriented around performance. There’s a model – a very simple model called John Grinder’s Chain of Excellence.” In the chain of excellence model, we say that a person’s performance is a function of their state. If you want to change a person’s performance, if you want to improve it they need to change their state. In the chain, we say the
Coach Mentor Podcast Transcript – Episode 4: Chris Collingwood Neuro Linguistic Programming – The history and use of NLP in coaching
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biggest, a major leverage point for change in the state is changing physiology. If you change your physiology you get to change in state, that’s going to impact on your performance and then if you want a leverage point for changing physiology change your person’s respiration. Now there’s a nice work coming out from psychology that’s important. In fact, there’s a very good TED, a video online – I don’t know if people know about TED.com but if you go to ted.com, there’s a woman psychologist there – unfortunately I can’t think of her name right now – but she has a whole presentation on some work that she found which fits nicely with the new code where people change their physiology. They adopt what she calls power postures. I don’t really like the way she names it but anyway she calls it power postures. The sort of postures you see in people let’s say after they have won a race. If you see a person at the end of the race, they’ve just one, their arms are up in the air, there’s curvature in their back, they’re open and they’re extended … they’re grinning from ear to ear. They’re in this wonderful state. Now what she has people do before going to a job interview, she has people in the bathroom let’s say, where no one can see them. They adopt this particular physiology where their arms are outstretched, they’re leaning back, they’re standing up, they’re open, they’re extended, and they’re grinning. She says hold that for two minutes before going to the interview – now in the experiments they’ve done - very similar candidates basically their CV is the same, they’ve organised them into two groups, they’ve matched the two groups in terms of experimental design. One group, let’s say Group A have done the power posture before going in, the other group hasn’t and invariably, something like 80% of the time, the people who have adopted the particular physiology as if they won the race, that physiology assessed as being the better candidate. RH:
The video that you’re referring to is Amy Cuddy –a social psychologist.
CC:
That’s it. It’s a very interesting video. That’s a nice fit with Grinder’s work with physiology. Grinder’s chain of excellence once again. Performance is a function of state. If you want to change your performance change your state. The biggest leverage point for rapid change of state is a change in physiology and if you want to support that change of respiration pattern. So if you just change your breathing and physiology simultaneously you get a nice change in state. That’s kind of like a fundamental idea in the new code and that’s one of the differences. We do a lot of work where we teach a lot of people how to change their state via their physiology, how to create what we could content free high performance states, we have games for doing that and then dropping those high performance states into the context where the person wants to
Coach Mentor Podcast Transcript – Episode 4: Chris Collingwood Neuro Linguistic Programming – The history and use of NLP in coaching
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increase their performance. It’s a very rapid way of creating change and it’s a very powerful way of doing it. That’s one of the features you’ll find in the new code – its emphasis on state manipulation via physiology. RH:
Okay, very helpful list of ways to distinguish the true from shall we say people purporting to be NLP trainers.
CC:
I think the easiest one to notice is a person using a scripted linear approach because if they are they’re probably not well trained. Somebody skilled in NLP is able to adapt what they’re doing around the person they’re working with. They’re very flexible and they’re working with first principles. They’re working with patterns rather than some script.
RH:
Fantastic! Chris, before I turn to telling our listeners about the various bits and pieces that we want to promote including your NLP field guide that’s just being re-launched on Kindle, is there anything else that you’d like to tell the listeners, anything else that would make this some more complete interview?
CC:
Well, I’ll say in terms of as an adjunct to whatever coaching model a person uses having a good training in NLP can really make a big difference in one’s coaching skills. I’d invite any coaches listening to consider exploring the possibility of doing content free work. It’s a fascinating way of working. Frankly, what I love about it is that the client – you’re creating a context but that client develops, creates and applies their own solutions, they have full ownership of the change that they make and as a result, you don’t get dependency on the coach.
RH:
Content free, absolutely critical addition to coaching. If people listening would like to access your training – I understand you do an early in the year and half yearly intake, when’s the next graduate certificate in NLP that you guys are running?
CC:
It starts the 29th of August and it is as I say a graduate certificate in NLP. It goes well beyond any practitioner or master practitioner training out there. It is all new code design, so we do teach some of the original material but everything we teach is within the new code framework. Now there are barriers to entry. It is post graduate so people need to have either a bachelor’s degree an advanced diploma or 3 years management experience. I think when we accredited the program it’s considered that if a person’s in a management position and have some experience in the management that typically is the equivalent of having a degree. Most managers have a degree now anyway.
Coach Mentor Podcast Transcript – Episode 4: Chris Collingwood Neuro Linguistic Programming – The history and use of NLP in coaching
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If a person meets those pre-requisites say they can join the program. We do it in two formats. We have an intensive format every year. We do the first half of the program January intensive, second half in February. We do a modular program starting April every year and we’re starting the second intake modular format that’s one unit per month starting in August. The other thing we’re very proud to say, we’ve recently been approved for that program – the post graduate program as a VET fee help provider. If a person wants to they can even apply to have vocational education training fee help – that’s a federal government job student loan system. RH:
Fantastic help. Now the NLP field guide is a book that you guys have written. It used to sell close to $100, just been re-launched on Kindle.
CC:
Yes. It’s $9.95. We’ve re-written it and republished it. We chose to have it under 10 dollars because of the way Amazon has their pricing system and how much they actually take, so we thought we’d go for a lower price. Interestingly and selling very well. It’s called the NLP field guide reference manual for practitioner level patterns. It contains all the patterns that we consider that should be in a good quality practitioner training. Now it is fairly typical where it’s really written for people who have had some NLP training. If somebody’s new to NLP, it’s probably not the best book if they have no exposure to NLP but if a person does some NLP training it’s a very good book. A very good support for what they’ve learned.
RH:
Now just looking online while were talking here, is there a part one and a part two to that book?
CC:
There’s a part one. We’ve been working on the part two. Interestingly, what’s taken precedence recently, we’re working on a two volume set and a new book – it’s a two volume set called, well the working title at the moment is NLP recoded. What we’ve been doing is writing about a lot of work we’ve been doing in the last 10 years of taking a lot of the classic or original materials and recoding it into a new code design, so we’re actually producing two books on that. They’re going to be out in the next 3 months. There will be a part two eventually.
RH:
Okay. We’ll keep your eyes for the new book there. Any chance of a visit by John Grinder?
CC:
We’re actually talking to John Grinder and Carmen Bostic at the moment and looking at a possibility of having him out next year but those haven’t been confirmed yet but we hoped to have those dates shortly. And by the way every time we bring John and
Coach Mentor Podcast Transcript – Episode 4: Chris Collingwood Neuro Linguistic Programming – The history and use of NLP in coaching
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Carmen out, we always have them do something interesting, something new, partly for John because I don’t think John likes doing stuff over and over again. We have him do all sorts of unusual things when we bring them out. Last time when we had them out we did a program where we were working with … really one of the key ideas was resilience which John and Carmen were able to do a new program with that. We’ve had them do all sorts of things. A couple years back, we had them out doing a program called heal within, which is really about how to actually activate your own internal resources to be healthy. We always come up with something interesting for the public but also something that’s going to keep their interest so they’re excited about what you’re teaching. RH:
Fantastic. Chris, it’s been an honour and a pleasure to talk to you today. Thank you so much for your time.
CC:
Thank you very much Robert. It’s been a pleasure for me.
RH:
Just a side note at the end, Chris and Jules are always on the lookout for new modelling projects, if you have course or reason to want your areas of expertise to be modelled get a hold of them at inspirative.com.au because they’re always excited develop, write down code areas of expertise to improve the performance of the rest of your team. We’re looking forward for you to joining us to the next podcast. In the next interview we’ll be talking to Jonathan Brake from Business Life Australia to discuss failing forward in business. Go to our podcast page for show notes from today. I’ll provide links there for organizations, businesses, books and the videos that have been mentioned in this podcast. Thanks for joining us.
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Coach Mentor Podcast Transcript – Episode 4: Chris Collingwood Neuro Linguistic Programming – The history and use of NLP in coaching
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