---

Guest post by: Jonathan Altfeld Become an Author

Tweet

---

---

Many people want the latest and greatest technique for persuasion and influence. Perhaps that's one of the more visible elements of marketing NLP, but hopefully it's not all people see. After all, some people really don't want to change their minds, and sometimes, it wouldn't be congruent or ecological to help them change their minds. It's nearly always incongruent and unecological to change their minds "for them" (after all, NLP can be very influential), with the rare extreme exceptions of dealing out interventions for drug and alcohol abusers and similar such situations.

For most normal day to day situations, while I strongly espouse finding ways to influence the world to help you build new possibilities for everyone, I'm not a big fan of pushing our persuasion and influence on people who aren't open to or ready for it.

I find that sometimes the act of deciding not to act with our skills -- is the optimal expression of our skills.

I also think a lot of NLP students, especially those focusing primarily on the persuasion and influence side of things, have forgotten or at least rely less than they could on the basic NLP foundation of gathering better information first, and using NLP's perceptual positions to consider multiple viewpoints in situations.

For example, I need more fingers than I have on both hands -- to count the number of times in just the past week that I used a range of NLP skills to decide NOT to use certain other NLP skills to change someone's mind.

This is the hammer-and-nail phenomenon I'm talking about. A lot of NLP students become so enamored of the power of their NLP skills to change minds, that every signal from another human being of being stuck or being disinterested in providing us what we ask for -- starts to look like a nail. So a "Hammer-and-Nail" guy would pull out one of his trusty hammers, and hammer away at the nail, not thinking of all the consequences. This is out of balance.

It behooves us to first understand people better, and to think of the bigger picture. It is not our job to change everyone. It's our job to enrich the lives of people when it's appropriate to do so -- including our own -- which, while I believe is often -- isn't "always, in all circumstances."

Sometimes it's best to tolerate people's stuck states. To tolerate their flaws, their inadequacies, their disappointment, and such. After all, I don't know a single perfect Neuro-Linguistic Programmer either, and I'm certainly not perfect. So maybe the Golden Rule -- which I heard somewhere actually pre-dates NLP -- might be useful to include here. :)

I spend a lot of my time aiming for excellence, directing attention towards productivity, creativity, proactiveness, action, and motivating people into more energized states. And I plan to continue to do so.

It's important to keep all that in balance. After all, how many of your family members want you to be changing their minds all the time? Not many, I'd bet. Sometimes it's more important to spend some time and effort to more deeply understand people, and just "be" with people -- and let them know behaviorally that that's also important to you.

Just a friendly reminder, amongst all the NLP-based messages you may be receiving from newsletters, from reading NLP books and listening to CDs, or watching videos... all espousing fast change techniques and positive thinking, that sometimes not using your NLP skills -- and just tolerating what's around you -- is your best possible use of NLP skills.

Here's an example from my own life -- I think it's great to want our kids to be smarter, more agile, more musical, more verbally gifted, more emotionally resourceful etc -- but we can go too far with this.

I noticed a few years ago with my older girl that every time I thought she could do better -- no matter how proud I was of her already -- if I always corrected or taught her something new -- she rapidly learned that I wasn't accepting what she was doing as 'good enough.' The signals of this were subtle, but I remember after two weeks of even more involved parenting, that her emotional responses to these additions were mixed. Perhaps some parents miss that signal and spend too many years behaving like that. Perhaps you know some like that.

After those two weeks, I changed my behavior and began to rely on a wider range of responses to show her that not only was I pleased with her no matter how she performed, but that occasionally I could also help her achieve better results.

In other words, I would show her total acceptance without question or criticism or even suggestions for improvement, sometimes when she performed less than ideally, sometimes when she performed well, and sometimes when she surprised all of us with her ramping excellence. I believe that taught her that I accepted her totally, at any level of performance.

Periodically, I would also offer suggestions for further growth, with the same tonality and language no matter what her prior performance (poor, good, excellent, didn't matter).

My aim was to prevent her from pattern-matching across my behavior and identifying uniquely consistent responses to different levels of her abilities or performance.

What I have found is that she still loves to show her parents when she does extremely well, but she also gets over her own disappointment from lower performance much more quickly than she used to. She knows she gets unconditional acceptance from us either way, which is teaching her

to do the same, for herself. So far so good!

Related Articles

  The Power of Excellence
  Inspirational Leadership: Show And Tell
  Communication Skills - What we need to be Aware of.
  Find out how to Communicate Effectivly
  Inventors Time to Sketch Up
  Success Affirmations: Powerful Words for Improving Your Life
  Leadership by Example
  Parenting: What you do that sabotages your child’s success without you knowing it
  Pursuing Excellence in Leadership
  Producing a Mission to Excel
  What are the 3 biggest challenges faced by supply chain/purchasing professionals today? (Survey Result 15)
  The Great Secrets of a True Leader
  Spam: You probably hate it but can you define it?
  How to Lead a Transformation of Your Team
  Four Critical Skills
  The 19Es of Excellence
  Article #14 Want To End Your Money Worries Forever?
  Lou Holtz on Winning
  Zero Tolerance Means Zero Leadership
  LEADERSHIP REQUIRES EXCELLENCE, NOT PERFECTION

Related Forum Posts

Re: Old vs New Facebook
Re: When Moderators refuse to post
Re: Businesswomen in the news
Re: Time changes everything.
Re: Old vs New Facebook

Share this article. Fund someone's dream.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Common Sense Stress Management

How to Write Your Compelling Vision Statement

Life is a Balancing Act!

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.