Beautiful blue eyes

So far we have talked about representational systems and eye accessing cues. Now it's time to talk about how to apply this in normal, everyday life?

As you begin to be able to understand the ways that other people are representing the world, you can recognize it and do nothing, recognize it and utilize it, or recognize it and influence it.

Let's start with an example that is quite simple to understand, although depending on your life circumstances may or may not have immediate application.

NLP Spelling Strategy

In the early days of NLP, it was observed that people who were excellent spellers almost all did a couple of common things. They visualized the word they wanted to spell (eye access up and to the left for a normally organized person) and then they do a kinesthetic check (eyes down to the right) after spelling it to see if what they said or wrote, felt right. If you ask a good speller how they know if the word is spelled correctly they will say something like "It feels like its right" or "It looks right". When they see a mis-spelled word on a page, a good speller may literally feel uncomfortable. (In NLP, when two senses are linked together like this it is called a synesthesia.)

If we want to help someone learn to spell better we want to teach them this strategy by building this synesthesia. It is worth noting that poor spellers use all kinds of strategies, none of which happen to do this. Some will try to sound the word out using a phonetic strategy which is ironic since if you try to spell phonics that way you should end up with "fonnix".

So how to teach the strategy.
(1) Take a written word and position it at or above eye level slightly to the left.
(2) Think of a feeling that is confident, comfortable or relaxing.
(3) If you positioned the word straight ahead, look up and to the left and picture the correct spelling in your mind. Try spelling the word backwards. This is a great test that you are truly seeing the word.

This process when repeated will form a pattern of remembering words visually and generating a feeling when you are seeing the word correctly. This is the strategy of great spellers.

If you are teaching this strategy to someone else you will use language and gestures to guide them in accessing this correctly. You will direct them to look at the word while gesturing up towards their left (assuming they are normally organized).

If you want to prove this out, test it out by finding some great spellers and watch what they do.  (NOTE: I have only experimented with this in English, but it likely applies more broadly, although some languages, like Spanish, are easier to spell in phonetically).

Are they lying?

Another potentially interesting use of eye accessing cues is to help tell if someone is telling the truth. There are many cues you can use to determine lying and we won't go into them all here, but eye accessing is one way to help detect truth or lying.

So if you have asked someone some questions and you know how they access construct memories and recalled memories then you have the basis for determining when they are telling the truth (recall) and when they are making up an answer.

Imagine that you ask your friend, "Did you go to that party over at Harry's this weekend?"  Assuming you know that your friend is normally organized and they access Visual Construct and they say, "Why yes I did.  It was great."  They may be making up what it would have been like to be at that party.  If they access recall then they might be remembering the party.

Now when you do this in the real world you begin to realize that people don't just make one access and answer.  They might first access recall of what they actually did on the weekend and then construct something that they can tell you that they did.

Sometimes you'll ask someone a question and they will access auditory first, which might mean they are repeating the question to themselves, then they access recall or construct as part of their answer.  Unfortunately it's not cut and dried, so you need to pay attention, ask questions, and learn.  The key is to understand that you can notice what people are doing and influence it.

Now some of this can be faked, and they may answer untruthfully by remembering something that has actually happened (perhaps not at that time and place or even not to them). It is an interesting indicator that you should experiment with.

A great source on this subject is Dr. Paul Ekman.

Play with these strategies and see what you can learn.  You might surprise yourself.

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OmniFocus vs. Things

Having been a long-term and obsessive OmniFocus user (since the early Alpha builds) I thought it was time to look at some of the alternatives out there.  I didn't really have time to review all the choices out there, but so I decided to do an evaluation of Things from Cultured Code.  There are plenty of exhaustive reviews of these products and the world probably doesn't need another one, so I'm going to describe just the key issues that drove me to ultimately replace OmniFocus with Things.

Like I said I've been an OF user since before it was officially released and purchased its iPhone app the day it was released.  OF has been a good friend, but it hasn't been without some trouble.  The iPhone app has never worked reliably for me.  I admit that I have a very large database and my workflow creates many of the tasks from e-mail.  OF currently includes email text and attachments in its database which causes significant bloat (according to their technical support).  This results in painful loading time on the iPhone and in my case it simply crashes almost all the time, either on start-up or after using it for 30-60 seconds.  After repeated attempts to resolve the issue I stopped using the iPhone app.

As I began to use Things I was excited by the chance to have a working iPhone app again.  The Things iPhone app provides a lot of the capability of the desktop and is very easy to use.  I like it, but with it lacks two features the OF iPhone app has.  OF has a wide variety of methods for syncing the iPhone and desktop databases.  The one I use is using .Mac/iDisk so that my databases sync no matter where I am as long as I'm on a network.  Things syncs over a wireless network when your iPhone and desktop software are on the same LAN.  This works very well, but really requires you remember to sync them before you go mobile.  So while I like the Things iPhone app, it still needs more work.  This wasn't a big deterrent for me in switching since I had adapted to not having a reliable iPhone app anyway.  The other feature the OF has is the ability to tag locations to your tasks and use the GPS to find tasks that can be completed in your vicinity.  This sounds like a neat feature and I know people who use it, but again without the app working for me is theoretical.  I would love it if Things added this though.

The things that really drove me to switch are:

(1) A beautiful UI. The Things UI is simple and clean.  OF is feature-laden, but a bit clunky.  There are tons of modes and settings, none of which I find profoundly useful.  One day I accidentally, without realizing it, set my system into a "Perspective" which caused many of my projects to simply disappear.  I was convinced by entire DB had become corrupted.  There are many clunky things like this in OF, that the simplicity of Things simply avoids.

(2) Tags.  I really love the idea of Tags in Things.  It's a general idea that you can Tag projects and you can Tag tasks and then filter the next actions you are looking at by Tag.  Tags can be used to implement Contexts and it also allows multiple Tags to be assigned to a single task.  I love this because I can easily implement the idea of "Waiting For".  When I delegate a task out I simply add the Waiting For task to it, which still preserves the other tags assigned to it.  In OF a task is in only one Context so I add it to Waiting For context, but lose track of which context it was originally in.

It also allows implementation of priority.  OF has a Flag capability that is binary, it's flagged or its not.  I used this to indicate priority, but invariably too many tasks get Flagged and it begins to lose its meaning without very careful management.  The Tag capability lets you implement whatever scheme you like.  This is a HUGE benefit of Things for me.

(3) Areas. Things lets you group projects into Areas.  This is quite flexible and lets you group tasks into "Work", "Home", "Father", "Husband", "Finance".  Then you can easily look at all your projects in that context.  This feature is completely optional, but I find it incredibly useful.  In OF previously I managed the same thing with SubProjects, but I found this quite cumbersome and grouping a large number of projects and making sure they stayed organized was fairly painful.

(4) Today. This might be my very favorite feature of all in Things.  There is a category called "Today" and you can simply take any projects in your "Next" list and designate them as "Today".  I love this for implementing the "Most Important Tasks" idea (See Review of Power of Less).  First thing in the morning I select 3-4 tasks that really must be done that done and add them to the Today category.  I begin working on those first and try to make sure they are done by the end of the day.  There is no good way that I know of in OmniFocus to implement this.

Conclusion and how to integrate with e-mail.

These are the major things that compelled me to switch to Things.  I am so happy I did.  Before I finish this I want to describe how I integrate with e-mail.  A very large number of tasks that come my way come via e-mail, but in my opinion neither OF or Things really handles this correctly out of the box.  I find this a shocking oversight.  To be fair they have both implemented a service that allows clipping and this can be scripted, but as far as I know you can only tell it to insert the selected item.  Normally when doing e-mail you want to add the e-mail to your inbox or directly to a project and then Move the e-mail out of your Inbox into some archive or reference folder (I call mine Reference).

So I am using Apple Mail.app for mail.  When I want to convert an email into a task hit the `-t key sequence and Mail Act-On will then invoke a script that launches the Quick Entry feature populated with a meaningful subject and a link to the e-mail in the Notes section.  Then when I want to do the task I can simply click on the link, the original e-mail is there which I can then reply to, forward, or whatever I need to do.  By default the task is entered placed in the 'Inbox' which I find to be the best place as I can more thoughtfully go back and assign it to a project, add tags, etc. later.

When I first started evaluating Things I wasn't sure if it was going to be possible because Things lacks a proper Apple Script interface, unlike OF which has an extremely powerful one.  Fortunately I found that Niclas Nilsson has developed and published a very creative solution that does exactly what I was looking for.  This mimics exactly how I want to use it and how was doing things with OmniFocus.  If you want to use Things I strongly encourage you to review his posting here.

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Last week we described the basics of NLP Representational Systems and how to identify how another person is representing their own internal model of the world.  This week we are going to refine this a bit more by showing how the eyes reveal important information and and we'll follow that up with an article that will really explain how to put all this information together into useful applications.

Eye Accessing Cues

In the early days of NLP, Bandler and Grinder noticed that people who were visual tended to look up when accessing their thoughts; auditory people tended to look sideways; and kinesthetic people tended to look down.  These are somewhat generalizations, but are surprisingly accurate.  In addition they noticed that if you ask someone a question that requires that they acccess an image (e.g. "What did your first car look like?") about how something looks that they are remembering they will look to a different side than if you ask them to "make up" up an image (e.g. What would George Bush look like in a mini-dress and stiletto heels?").  So for the first question, it's quite likely (better than average chance) the person will look up to their left (at least for a moment), but for the second question they will look up and to their right.  The same basic pattern applies for accessing auditory representations.  It's useful to distinguish between what is called "Auditory Analog" and "Auditory Digital" as well.  Digital refers to words and analog refers to anything else you would hear including tones, tempo, pitch, etc.  So when someone is generating internal self-talk they will tend to access Auditory Digital (down to the left).

If you say to someone, "So how do you feel about that?"  They are likely to look down to their right.  When somone is looking for the words to describe something (Auditory digital) they are likely to look down and to their left.

The directions described above are for someone "normally organized". This simply means that most people look left for remembered and right for construction. Other people will be opposite and look right for remembered and left for construction (informal estimates are that about 90% of the population is normally organized).  This pattern appears to be highly consistent and independent of culture. John Grinder has noted that the only exception he's aware of is the Basques who don't follow a readily identifiable pattern.

It's worth a reminder at this point that these are generalizations.  You should test all of this and learn to notice for yourself the relationship between questions and how other people access their representations. A way to calibrate is to ask a series of questions relevant to the context you are in. So if you are in real estate and want to calibrate you might ask a colleague :

Q: Remind me, what is the color of that house we have listed on Elm Street?

This question already suggests that you want the person to remember, and then the question you ask presupposes a visual response (for the vast majority of people). You may notice as you ask questions that some people will continue to stay focused directly ahead and their pupils may dilate rather than moving horizontally or vertically. This usually indicates accessing information visually.

The chart below shows the eye accesses for people who are normally organized. 

NLP Eye Accessing Cues

So what use is this? First and foremost, once you are aware of how people around you are representing their world you can utilize that information to communicate more effectively. In upcoming articles we will be building on eye accessing cues and explain how to use them in many interesting ways. For now we recommend learning the basics of noticing what is going on and learning to ask good questions that let you isolate what is happening. That brings us to the exercises:

Exercise 1: Write out 3-5 questions that would let you calibrate the access (like the real estate example we gave above) for each of the 3 major representational systems: visual, auditory, kinesthetic.

Exercise 2: Use the questions you have written out with at least 10 people over the next week and see what you can notice.

Exercise 3: Watch people talk in a natural setting and see how people access information with their eyes.

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The lists below define the most common words and phrases that you can use to help identify the internal representations that someone else is using. There are a number of words that can refer to multiple systems, so you have to rely on other clues (as described in the earlier article) to determine their usage. For example the word pierce could be used with visual, auditory or kinesthetic representations. The word bouquet might bring to mind an image of a wedding with a bridal bouquet or the full bodied bouquet of a wine. Smell and taste are often linked and the words can easily refer to one or both, i.e. something can taste burnt and smell burnt.

Remember to use these with other cues. 

There are a well known set of words that are used fairly frequently and do not fall into either category. These are sometimes grouped into the Auditory Digital category. Since many people ask about these words, we include a short list of words and phrases here.

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A brief word on NLP models.  Everything we present on the topic of NLP is just a model.  Very often there is good science to go with it, but these models were primarily built based on observing and experimenting with what worked in real situations with real people.  Then models were build to allow others to assimilate the skills and produce the same results.  It's very important to understand and not get too caught up in whether something is literally true, but rather whether its useful (or not) in achieving the desired result.  The way to determine that is to test it.  Nothing you will read in the next 100 or probably 1000 postings on this blog is of any use at all if it isn't used and tested out there in the real world - away from your computer.

The model we are talking about right now is called Representational Systems (or lets say "rep systems" for short).  

It basically says that people organize their mental processing in terms of the 5 sensory systems:

• visual
• auditory
• kinesthetic
• olfactory
• gustatory

It means that when someone remembers something the memory is represented using at least one of these rep. systems.  When you think about a house you used to live in you remember the way it looked from the street, or you remember the smell when you walked inside, or perhaps you remember the sound it made as you lay in bed at night, or you remember sitting in a room feeling the warm sun in come in on you.  I'm not sure what tastes you might associate with a house, but there may be some.  The same is true of thoughts that you are constructing or inventing - the thought is rooted in one or more representational systems.

Some representations are more appropriate in some contexts than others.  It makes sense that when learning a tactile skill or sport, kinesthetics are often more important.  When practicing a piece of music, auditory representations might be more useful, and in planning how to re-decorate a room, a visual set of representations may be most important.  It is almost always true that its most useful to make representations that include as many representational systems as possible.

Some people will tend to have a dominant or primary representational system although everyone almost everyone uses all representational systems at various times.  Being able to recognize and match the representational systems that another person is using is extremely useful in building rapport and communicating effectively.

So what does any of this have to do with anything?

Well as it turns out people who use the same representational systems at the same time tend to communicate more effectively.  If someone is primarily visual and you want to explain an idea to them and you tend to operate more kinesthetically and you aren't aware of that, how successful do you think you'll be?  By recognizing your own preferences and how other people use rep systems to represent the world, you can rapidly multiple your results in communicating with others.

So how do you identify the representational systems used by someone?  Well you can observe 3 basic things: physiology, eye movements, and language. 

Physiology of Representational Systems

Sometimes you can get a general idea of the representation system that another person is using by observing their physiology.  Please not that these are only generalities, it's possible to hold the physiology described while accessing a different representational system, but when you test this I think you'll find it pretty accurate. 

Visual: Often times, a person using visual representations will tend to talk more quickly, their voice may have a higher pitch and they may breath higher in their chest.  They will tend to gesture more as if to paint a picture, and their general orientation with gestures and glances tend upward.

Auditory: May talk medium to fast; breathing will tend to be from the middle of their chest, gestures will tend to be at chest level.  Their voice may tend to be more resonant.  

Kinesthetic: May talk quite slowly; breathing will tend to be lower in the chest and their voice may be deeper; gestures will be slower and lower.

Olfactory/Gustatory: These systems are not usually primary systems and there are not identifiable physiological markers that readily identify them.

Language of Representational Systems

The words that people use are an excellent indication of how they are representing the world internally.  You might know someone that says, "I see what you mean."  At the very least it's an interesting phrase, but it certainly suggests that the person is literally seeing or visualizing something in their mind, probably some representation of what you said.  If someone says, "I hear what you are saying", chances are they are literally hearing in their mind what you are saying.  You can probably think of a number of words that indicate a particular sense (our next article will contain a detailed list of words and phrases and the rep. system they indicate).

Eye Accessing Cues

Next week we will have a series of articles on this.  So stay tuned.

Exercises

For now we recommend a few exercises to get better at noticing:

Exercises #1: Ask a friend to tell you a story of something interesting that they have done.  Listen for different parts of their description that would indicate visual, auditory, or kinesthetic information.  Ask them to re-tell the story, describing the things that they were seeing.  Ask them to re-tell the story, describing primarily the sounds.  Ask them to re-tell the story, describing primarily the feelings (tactile or internal).  With each story, pay attention to each of sensory system.  This will help you practice paying attention to sensory information.  As you watch each story, notice for any changes in physiology, gestures, voice tone, etc.

Exercise #2: Tell a story to a friend or into a tape recorder of an interesting experience that you have had.  Follow the same format above.  Just tell the story.  After the story, notice if there is one sensory system or another that you seemed to prefer.  Re-tell the story with a focus on each of the representational systems.

Exercise #3: Learn ImageStreaming.  This technique, when practiced regularly will help you strengthen your ability to access each rep. system completely.

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Let's be clear up front. 

NLP is not "science" even though its name might suggest it (John Grinder has called it an 'ill-named endeavor').  It also never pretended to be science.  NLP techniques have been studied by scientists with somewhat mixed results.  Many of its ideas have also filtered into the mainstream and are now commonly accepted wisdom and show up in a variety of business, sales, education trainings (often relabeled or renamed without attribution).  

Richard Bandler and John Grinder continue to teach their own brands of NLP and went their separate ways in the late 1970s.  By far the most famous and successful trainer (speaking of $$$) is Tony Robbins.  His original book "Unlimited Power" (link) describes many of the basic and original NLP patterns quite clearly.  In later work he re-named what he did to be Neuro-Associative Conditioning System (NACS).  A whole industry has sprung up to certify people as practitioners and trainers of NLP and has made more than a few people quite wealthy.  There is nothing wrong with that, but a field training new trainers creates constant competition and many different factions have sprung up over the years with widely varying views of "What is NLP?".  If you look deeper into NLP be prepared to sift through a lot of marketing hype.  An outsider looking in at the field may rightfully be dismayed, confused, disgusted, or turned off, which is unfortunate because there is some real value there.  

For the purposes of this blog, we have no agenda or intention to promote NLP, but we will be presenting a series of 10-20 posts that explain basic NLP material because we find it so useful.  We hope this will be useful for those who want to learn the best of what NLP has to offer, but don't have time to sift the wheat from chaff.  Although thoroughly trained in NLP, we are not trainers of NLP, do not certify and don't derive any significant income from NLP.

As with anything we strongly recommend approaching the material with skepticism.  We also strongly encourage resolving that skepticism by testing the concepts, techniques and patterns with full belief that they work.  Only after you have fully engaged in testing them out, determine if they have value for you or not.  We will frequently include exercises or activities in the articles that will help you do this.

So back to the definition, what is it really? 

We will define it as really two things:  First it is an accelerated learning methodology.  The primary technique of which is called modeling.  In overly simplistic terms its the ability to learn and replicate skills like any baby can do - or monkey-see monkey-do.  Yet since so few people are able to truly replicate the skills of genius it seems worthwhile to examine.

In early 1970's Richard Bandler had a job working for a company doing audio/video recordings of some well known therapists in the Santa Cruz area, in particular Fritz Perls, developer of Gestalt Therapy, and Virginia Perls, a highly regarded family therapist.  

Richard and his friend Frank Pucelik, began running their own groups replicating what they were seeing Fritz Perls do.  In fact they were quite successful at doing so - Richard in particular.  However, what Richard was unable to do was transfer those skills to the others in the group.  He could not explain what he was doing.  He approached John Grinder, then a Professor of Linguistics at UC Santa Cruz to join and help figure out how to describe what was being done.  They began working together with wild abandon on a wide range of topics within the theraputic domain, leading to the modelling of Virginia Satir and Milton Ericson, M.D. a well known hypnotherapist who could produce amazing results.  They were brash and arrogant, and rapidly achieved a following around the country.  They produced a number of early books and claimed to be able to treat patients no one else could cure, even though they had little formal therapeutic training.  The books and seminars were attempting to convey models that would enable anyone desiring to, to achieve results similar to the original model (i.e. Perls, Satir, Ericson), 

So our first definition of NLP is really the ability to observe a genius in action and replicate their skills, and provide a transferrable model that allows others to also achieve similar results.

That is the least common definition of NLP.  What is more frequently taught are the models themselves (our 2nd definition).  There are a large number of patterns developed in NLP for resolving trauma, grief, generating hypnotic trance, curing phobias, building rapport, etc.  However, more broadly and more usefully there are a set of general patterns for communications that are broadly applicable to all communications in personal relationships, business, education, etc. 

A few interesting additional developments have been made over the past 20 years, but the vast majority of patterns were identified early on in the development during that fruitful partnership between Bandler and Grinder.

Until next week...

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The Meta-Model was first described by John Grinder and Richard Bandler in their book Structure of Magic vol. 1.  In their observation of successful therapists, like Virginia Satir, they began to notice systematic use of certain language patterns that allowed these therapists to ask just the right question and enabled them to often get right to the heart of the matter.  This page describes the meta-model patterns.

Introduction

John Grinder was a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and his area of speciality was something relatively new at the time called Transformation Grammar.  The meta-model is based loosely on some of that model of linguistics, particularly the notion of surface structure and deep structure.  

Basically, surface structure describes the words being used, and deep structure represents the intuition a person has about the words that enables them to make sense of it.  The surface structure and deep structure are different, in that the surface structure contains deletions, distortions, and generalizations.  These 3 processes, while essential to functioning in the world, can also allow people to walk around with limitations in their view of the world.  For example, if someone walks up to you and hits on the head, and then another person, you might conclude that you should avoid all people because "People always hit me on the head."  It might useful for preserving ones safety in certain situations, but not very useful in forming wonderful and long-lasting relationships.  The meta-model provides a way for you to open up possibilities in what people say... 

The Model

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What is it that generates this kind of rapport between two people and do you have any choice of it being present, or is it just fated that some people will have rapport with one another and others won't?

First, imagine if you will for a moment, two people in conversation. One person might be passionately talking and gesturing wildly with their hands while the other person is sitting leaned back in their chair with their arms crossed and held tightly with their eyes on the ground. While there are many possible interpretations to give to that description changes are that you are imagining two people who are not being highly responsive to each other.

Contrast that with two people sitting across from each other at a restaurant. Both are leaning forward in their chairs with their elbows on the table and their hands clasped together. While one is listening the other is looking directly at the speaker, and when the turn to talk naturally shifts from one to the other the new listener is just as attentive to the new speaker. One of these people might reach for their water glass and instinctively the other will grab their glass and drink at the same time.

People who are in rapport with each other are responsive to each other and are responding to each other in a way that honors the beliefs and the model of the world of the other.

As another thought experiment, imagine in your mind the stereotypical relationship between a parent and a teen. This often involves the parent nagging, yelling, lecturing the teenager and the teen responding perhaps by arguing or yelling back or perhaps just leaving the situation altogether and storming out. In this case the parent and child are responding to each other, but neither is being respectful of the values, beliefs, or even being of the other person. At some level there are beliefs about the other person, their beliefs, or their behaviors that are not respectful.

It is very possible for people with deep rapport to disagree and argue, however because they are willing to honor the other person, and understand and accept each others models of the world, reaching an understanding can occur much more rapidly. This in no ways implies that two people will always agree, but can when in rapport can find a way to interact productively for each others mutual benefit.

A subsequent series of articles will explore the mechanics of how to build rapport, but let me close this posting with a few of the foundational beliefs/attitudes that if one will adopt, will make to gaining and maintaining rapport with others much easier:

1. People are smart
2. People are well-intentioned
3. Rapport is a completely natural process that occurs by honoring the person you are communicating with.
4. People are all connected at some level (we are all of the same species, from the same creator, part of the same universe). However you want to think about you being interconnected with the rest of the people on the earth.

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