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Seeing
Pictures or Hearing Words? The world abounds with information about improving communication skills. Most information, however, does not detail the following, which is an important aspect to learn a bit about. It's called Process verses Content. Just what is the difference, anyway, and why is it important to make this distinction? Anyone that has studied behavioural science, or even more specifically NLP, should be able to answer those questions quite easily, so for some this article will serve as a review. For others it will be a way of expanding your communication knowledge and performance even more. Let's begin with content. Content can be thought of as the "story" presented. Some examples might be: A sales presentation - in which case, the subject matter, or story (content) would be about the product (its benefits to the potential customer) his or her verbalized responses, and so on. At another time, the content matter might be about some issue regarding a teenager's behaviour between parents, with each (including the offspring) presenting their respective position about that behaviour (content). We can also make the same distinctions in a therapeutic encounter, in which case the client presents a problem they would like assistance in resolving. The information the client will offer will also fit our definition of content, that is, they will offer a verbal description of the issue, or issues of concern.
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Now, let's superimpose the concept of process. In the above examples, the person presenting the "story" will first have to "process" the data, within the mind, before (or if, you prefer) during the verbalization (telling the "story"). The idea is to begin to pay attention to HOW they do this, or, especially if you are new to the concept, to ask them how they do it. Now, before we end up in gaga-land by confusing all this with a new mind-reading technique, please remember: The only people that are any good at mind reading are called wives, so leave it to them. Now, allow me to illustrate the concept with an example, and we'll use an "EFT moment" to do so. The client is offering
information about a problem to be resolved; say a fear of flying. Normally
the practitioner of EFT would zero in on "this fear," and quickly set
up a round of tapping, asking the client to focus on "this fear," as
the round is tapped. More often than not, this is exactly how to proceed
to affect a resolution to the fear. Once in a while, little change occurs,
and the practitioner then does the PR procedure, the 9 Gamut, perhaps
the N.D. procedure and so on. Again, this is fine, for the most part,
and a reduction in symptoms (the fear) is accomplished.
Sometimes, however, this is not the case, and so at worst, the practitioner may begin to feel EFT doesn't work, the client has a hidden agenda, there is probably an allergy interfering, and so on. Generally speaking, when using EFT we are taught to find the "feeling," and tap on it. But not necessarily everyone accesses their problem or issue, as a feeling. Then we remember process. A question to the client may be, "When you think of the fear, how, exactly do you process it? What I mean is, how do you access the fear?" Now, for the sake of brevity, let's suppose the clients answers, "Well, whenever I picture a plane in my mind, I get scared." We are now analysing process, that is, the client accesses a picture (in this case a plane) which is a visual representation of the problem, that downloads as a kinesthetic, which the client identifies as a fear of flying. We now have the client focus on the picture as we tap a round, and results are on the way. The thing to remember is this. Process is about how the person primarily represents, and therefore accesses, the problem. This person can be your son, talking about an issue at school, a sales client, or a client you're helping therapeutically. Granted, when it comes to fears, being unsure, intimidated and so on, the problem is often represented as some kind of body sensation (kinesthetic). The point to remember is the primary representation can also be auditory, i.e., a little voice in the head that says, "Oh, no, not this again," or an internal visual representation. Learning about
process, and integrating that knowledge into your communication skills
will definitely give you a "leg up," and help to enhance your negotiating
skills and or therapeutic skills, even more.
Clever Outdoor Advertising #1
Editor's Note: We thought you would find the following quite interesting... the email is from Leslie Wilson, an EFT Practitioner in Burnaby, BC, who also happens to teach Irish dancing and the young woman she talks about in the email is her daughter Rebeca. Hi Alex and Berit, I thought you might find the following interesting - Rebeca and her boyfriend Daniel (the eternal skeptic of anything to do with "energy" work) undertook an experiment after Rebeca had read "The True Power of Water" by Emoto. They both placed pieces of bread from the same loaf in little Ziploc bags. Meanwhile Daniel wrote "Smelly & Awful; and worthless piece of garbage" and told it how yucky it was. Both baggies were placed on the living room mantle. Since the experiment was not done in a controlled environment, Daniel is not at all convinced yet, but I find it good incentive, nevertheless, to bless the food we eat! Have a good day!
Nominalisations
and Hypnosis _______________________________________ Wow - what big words! It´s ok though, because we are going to find out what they mean and discover a bit about what you can do with them! So, to start with - a nominalisation is a verb a process or doing word) that has been changed into a noun (or name word). This means that what started off as something that was happening, becomes something that is static. For example, "We will be paying our staff by bank transfer," becomes, "Staff payment will be by bank transfer." Or, "He decided to resign," becomes, "The decision was resignation." The simple test for a nominalisation is this, ask yourself, "Can I put it in a wheelbarrow?" If the answer is "no" then it is probably a nominalisation. In the academic world of reports and papers this form of abstract language is highly favoured because it take less words to say something and it is impersonal. In the world of understanding language and communication the loss of information can produce a vagueness that the listener fills in from their own experience. So, when I see a client, I can talk about solutions to the problem without knowing what the problem is, or what the solutions could be, and make perfect sense to the listener. For example, ".... so you have come to see me about helping you to solve a problem, and I know that as long as you know what the problem is it will be OK. Now to find solutions to the problem we shall be using visualization techniques... " Notice how many nominalisations there are in that short sentence! And the listener will "fill in the blanks" and, when we get going, will find solutions too! As the listener begins to "fill in the blanks" this will cause activity in the brain (known as a "transderivational search") as they search for the things that they want to add in order to make sense of what has been said. I have even had people ask how I knew so much about them! The result of this will be a light trance state. To capitalize on this you can now add visualization and the use of sensory specific language. "What´s that?" I expect you cried! That too is very simple. They are the words that we use to describe what we see, hear, feel, smell and taste. So to use a simple indirect hypnotic method you ask the client to remember a time when they were very relaxed and content about things. Ask them to remember where they were, what they could see, what the colours were like, is the picture in their mind´s eye misty or clear, close to them or not. What sounds can they hear, are the sounds soft or loud, musical or talking... and if you could be back there now how would you feel, calm, peaceful, tranquil, like drifting along or floating in the air... And as you enjoy that place in your memory you can also wonder what would solve the problem that you had when you came in. What would it be like when you haven´t got the problem anymore and how many different ways could you find to solve this and other smaller problems ... and just let your unconscious mind start the processes necessary to ... Have a go yourself by making a recording and noticing what happens when you listen to it. Of course there is much, much more to hypnotherapy than this short article can cover and maybe this will become something that you develop an interest in and find lots of ways to study and develop skills that you can find useful in many areas of life. There is loads of stuff on the Internet to help you get started Just imagine what
might happen if you started to talk to a client using indirect language
while doing the EFT tapping procedure - just a suggestion someone might
like to investigate.
You can contact
Rehana at webstar@ps.gen.nz
Paranoia The presenting problem was paranoia….extreme paranoia. What was she paranoid about? This client, I'll call her Kay, was totally paranoid about her husband looking at pornography on the television. Paranoia, as you are probably aware, is an abnormal tendency to suspect and mistrust others, but from all I could determine, this poor man never looked at pornography on the TV. She never caught him watching anything else but rugby or sports of some sort. I asked Kay to figure out what her 'bad behavior' was giving her. What was the pay off? What positive feelings did she get from spying on Dave? Well, the background to this was from her previous marriage. Her first husband was evasive, sneaky and not to be trusted according to her. He had several affairs while married to Kay and she had started to become paranoid as she could not believe a word he said. Her paranoia generalized into her second marriage and if she didn't stop acting this way, this marriage was going to end soon. So, the pay off for 'spying' on Dave was that it absolutely convinced Kay that he was not watching pornography. Only when she saw the television tuned into a sports channel, she felt a great sense of relief and a feeling of being loved. Now we had a couple of issues to work with and I decided to go with the first one. The 'love' feeling was another aspect of this problem. Using NLP anchoring techniques, I got Kay to identify the good feelings and got her to amplify them. I got her to do this several times till I could get her to just go into those good feelings when I pressed the anchor point. Next I asked Kay to think about how she starts to feel paranoid and how that feeling builds up to bursting point till she sneaks up to see what's on the television. I asked her to nod her head as she got to that point and when she did, I pressed the anchor for the good feelings. She looked really confused and her face visibly relaxed as did her breathing and a nice rosy glow appeared on her face. I asked her to continue thinking of the stress she felt as she imagined Dave watching pornographic stuff. Well, we went thru this exercise about three more times and she just couldn't get the stress and paranoia back… it just couldn't be brought back. I got her to test it out a couple of times more. Interesting how she was able to get those good relaxed feelings without stressing out about what Dave was watching. Then we dealt with the 'love' feelings. I used EFT tapping for this and got Kay to just verbalize her free flow internal dialog regarding love and pornography. I got Kay to rate the relief she felt when she found that Dave was not doing anything offensive. It was 10… no wonder she was so keen on finding how wrong she was so she could feel good! That was a great feeling to go for… except the behavior getting her there was dysfunctional. I got her to tap on the following.
At this moment we had an AH HA moment. Kay realized that this part of her was trying to keep her safe. This part justified the obsessive behavior! Kay went bright red in the face and laughed about the internal conflict that had created her bizarre and comical behavior which was protecting her feelings. 'I don't need to do that any more,' she said, and then added, 'Dave is definitely not Ron the Rat!'
Clever
Outdoor Advertising #2
Clever
Outdoor Advertising #3 Berit's
Corner So, we turned on the TV and discovered some very good shows on PBS. For those of you not in North America, PBS is the Public Broadcasting System, like and similar to the BBC in the UK. They have shows about politics, science and whole host of other subjects, some of which are fascinating. I only mention this because I think that there's probably some of you out there that may not have discovered PBS yet, or thought it might be kinda stuffy... it's not. One show is called NOVA Science NOW and I was captivated, and as some of you may know, science is something I generally have no interest in. But, this show made the subject of science come alive. Otherwise we didn't do much this summer. One highlight was our friend Tamara's visit a few weeks ago. Tamara had a wedding to go to up here and her husband couldn't come with her, so I was her "date" for the event. The service was in a rose garden with the reception following. We had a lovely time but left when the dancing started as we had plans to go to a casino. As usual, I played the machines for several hours on $20.00. By 2:00 am I was so tired I couldn't' punch the bottons any longer and almost begged Tamara to leave. She was on a winning streak, but finally the tide turned and she cashed out. She was about $400.00 ahead. Good for her! Then we spent the next couple of days relaxing around the house, did a little shopping and just hung out. Tamara asked if she could read the book. Up until then, no one but me and Alex (not even Rehana who has done the wonderful illustrations) had read it. It was like handing over a precious package, then waiting with bated breath to hear what Tamara thought of it. Tamara's feedback was wonderful! She's not only read most of the self help books published over a 15 year period, she's met most of the authors as she used to be their guide when they came to Seattle on book tours. So, we value her opinion. Having Tamara read it gave me the courage to send it to Rehana. Her feedback was also invaluable because she's a psychotherapist and workshop presenter and knows the information Alex has written about. Rehana also thought it was excellent! We could say that
because Rehana and Tamara are our friends, they were being kind and
generous. But, both of them reassured us that was not the case; they
both told us the truth! Of course, this is all a build-up to get your
curious and excited about the book. So far so good on the feedback journey! We are waiting for feedback from a few more friends and when we get it, we will be making the recommended changes and corrections and will then send the manuscript to the editor in a couple of weeks. Meanwhile we have our Fall workshop schedule ready to go. We'll be doing EFT Level 1, 2 and 3 workshops starting in September. It may be our last series of EFT workshops for a while because in 2008 we will be introducing our new workshops based on our book. So, if you, or anyone you know, is interested in learning EFT from Alex, this Fall would be a good time. We'll also try to include a couple of NLP workshops (time permitting) as we believe adding NLP skills to your application of EFT really does make EFT more effective. And, the feedback from people that have combined the two has been great! But, before we gear up for all that activity, I'm going to enjoy the last bit of summer and hope for some sunshine. My plan of action will be to do nothing. Doing "nothing" can be very relaxing and fun. Hopefully you too, can do a bit of nothing, before getting back into the swing of things in the Fall! Take care,
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Rebeca
drew a heart and wrote "Perfect" on her bag and then told the bread
how beautiful it was.
We
went away to Ceili Camp (summer camp for Irish dancers) for a week.
We returned to find the "Smelly & Awful" bag full of mold, and the bread
in the "Perfect" bag looking as fresh as the day it was bought.
Contributing
Columnist Dave Marshall is retired and lives in Spain. Before his retirement
he taught NLP (he's an NLP Master Trainer) and now has a website with
lots of free information on NLP. You can contact Dave at 
Contributing
Columnist Rehana Webster (in New Zealand) is an EFT Master and NLP Master
Practitioner, and also conducts seminars/workshops internationally.
Kay
would try and catch him out by returning home from visiting her son
and sneaking up to the lounge to see what the husband was watching.
So, she was truly paranoid about this and it was ruining her marriage.
The husband, I shall call him Dave, was getting quite irate with Kay's
behavior.
I hope you all had a great summer. Our summer could have been better
weather wise, but an interesting unintended consequence of the bad weather
was that we found some wonderful shows on TV. Normally we don't watch
much TV in the summer 'cause we're either walking the doggies in the
evening, working in the yard, or having a late supper on our deck. But,
when it's pouring rain who wants to be outside... you get soaking wet
and it's cold!
Also,
some of the current political affairs shows are excellent because they
go beyond the headlines and give much more information on what's really
going on in the world today. It's good to activate your brain once in
a while, so in addition to watching stuff like CSI and crime dramas
in the winter, we're gong to add PBS to our watching TV schedule. I
also love the "Mystery" series which usually has excellent programs
made in the UK. I highly recommend you check out PBS and see if you
can't find something you like... another bonus is... NO commercials!
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(C) 2007 - Dr. Alexander R. Lees & Associates Inc.