NLP In Training

Here's a quick description of how four of the skills of NLP can be applied to training and how I apply them. The skills are:

Modelling A Style
Rapport
Matching The Process Of Learning And Understanding
The Use Of Metaphor

Modelling A Style

In my role as a hospital Training Officer I train people in customer care, management skills and computer use. I need to be able to present concepts and attitudes to large groups as well as be able to present complex skills and theories to individuals, all of whom have different needs and different learning styles.

When I started as a trainer I wanted to be the best trainer I could possibly be, so I used NLP modelling skills to model people whose style I liked. So I modelled the business 'guru' Tom Peters, the American motivational speaker Tony Robbins and a Canadian business trainer named Mike Hartley-Brewer.

I watched videos of these people and noted how they behaved, how they used their voices, how they moved around, how they developed a line of reasoning.

Then I read interviews with them looking for clues to questions such as "what must they believe to allow them to present like that in front of large groups?"

The next step was for me to then think about how I reacted when presenting in front of a group. Like many people I got nervous, my voice became monotone and I would forget what I was talking about. So I used a range of NLP skills to change the way I though about presenting in front of groups so that I could act and present in a way similar to the three people I had modelled.

I now have a personal and fairly distinctive style of presenting. I wouldn't claim that my style is the best style, but it works for me, and considering the feedback from my course participants it is a style that people enjoy and respond well to.

The three people I chose to model don't in anyway constitute a recommended collection of subjects. As with many things in NLP it is the process and the structure that are important, not the content.

Pick two or three presenters whose style you would like to replicate and then identify the things they do which make them distinctive. As you adopt these distinctive qualities they will become a part of your personality and a part of your (now extended) repertoire of techniques.

This is simply how I applied the techniques. As with many things in NLP the important part is the process, i.e. what specifically was done. Of lesser importance is the content. I could have picked almost any presenter to model, and other people choose other subjects.

Rapport

Being able to stand up in front of a group is only one part of the jigsaw. A presenter who antagonises or bores the audience is unlikely to be effective. When I start a training session my first and highest priority is to gain rapport, nothing else will work until the process of rapport building has begun.

Since everyone is individual, each person responds differently to a trainer, so there is no single sure-fire method of creating rapport. It's a case of try one approach and if it works keep doing it and if it doesn't work try another approach.

Maintaining rapport is then essential throughout the training. I will change the way I phrase questions and answers so that rapport is maintained, I will be more or less confrontational as is required to maintain rapport, I will deliberately include or exclude items in order to maintain rapport.

Because within rapport almost anything can be discussed, people can criticise each other and challenge each other and as long as the rapport is maintained it is part of the natural flow of the conversation. The criticism or challenge only offends when it is done outside rapport.

So how is rapport created and maintained?

Recall that two of the NLP beliefs are that

everyone makes their own unique map of the world
everyone bases their decisions on their map, not on the world itself

Each individual tends to believe that their map is the right map, the best map, the most reasonable map. The more you show alignment and similarity with someone's map the deeper the level of rapport that will be created.

The simplest method is to verbally agree with what they say, but beyond this people can share beliefs, values and behaviours - this sharing (effectively a similarity in their maps) is the key to rapport.

As a trainer, if the majority of my communications (both verbal and non-verbal) match those of the person I am communicating with, and hence we are in rapport, then I can disagree with them using the other part of my communications without breaking that rapport.

What, specifically, can be done in terms of verbal and non-verbal communications to create and maintain rapport is something best experienced in real life and not put into electronic words. It would be like trying to describe great sex, reading it and experiencing it just don't compare!

Matching The Process Of Learning And Understanding

The analogy I often use is this one - when someone learns to drive they first learn the basics of steering, gears and brakes. When they have basic competence with these then they go on to learn more advanced skills.

Some trainers I've seen (particularly computer 'experts' who are doing the training) try and explain everything about the File menu first, and then everything in the Edit menu, and then everything in the Options menu and so on.

This would be like trying to get the learner driver to master the steering wheel before explaining what the gear shift is for.

Training is more effective when the material is presented in a manner which matches the way people learn and understand. For a description see the section on The Model Of Learning And Understanding.)

Different people approach learning in different ways. Some people like to start with the small details and work up towards the 'big picture' - others like to start with an overview and then work down (or 'chunk down' in NLP jargon) to smaller details. One of the challenges in training is to accommodate so many different styles.

I approach this by starting with an overview illustrated with examples of specific details. As I progress I include more detail and combine details into bigger chunks.

Some people prefer to listen to a verbal description and others prefer illustrations - so I talk a lot as well as writing and illustrating what I say on a flip chart. Other people prefer to learn by doing, so I make a point of including exercises, which usually involve discussion and writing/illustrating.

There's a whole section in NLP devoted to describing these different patterns, the different ways in which people organise their experiences. One way of gaining and maintaining rapport is to determine a person's pattern (you can do this by listening to the language they use) and then adopting a similar pattern. This can be fairly straightforward with individuals and a challenge with groups.

The Use Of Metaphor

I recently needed to explain to a non-technical person why it was important to turn off the computer in the correct manner. Instead of using a technical explanation I explained that it was the same as a video recorder, if a tape was in and playing you wouldn't just pull the plug on it - you would stop the tape and take the tape out first. She smiled and went "Ahhh, that's why!"

Strictly speaking the reasons for turning off the computer in the correct way are nothing like turning off a video recorder - but this is an example of using metaphor in training.

Operationally the term metaphor covers many linguistic forms such as metaphors, analogies, similes, examples and stories. Although these forms are all different in the strict sense - people tend to react the same when they are used in a training/coaching/counselling setting.

There are many skills involved in using metaphors, to illustrate this let's take a quick look at constructing one particular form.

Much of the learning process takes place at the unconscious level and the unconscious mind tends to work more with relationships between things than with the things themselves. We can use this to construct metaphors. If I want to talk to a group about motivating staff (but without directly talking about money) then I can take the following approach:

{staff} {can be motivated by} {money}
this can be thought of as
{noun} {verb} {noun} - the 'verb' is the relationship
If we keep the relationship the same and simply change the verbs we can arrive at:

{children} {can be motivated by} {sweets}

Thus by having a harmless discussion about parents rewarding children we can discuss attitudes towards staff pay and reward. When the relevant message has been discuss (perhaps that children require sweets as well as discipline) then the conversation can be guided back to the work based setting.

This approach of keeping the structure intact is called isomorphism.

The use of metaphor is so powerful and there are so many aspects that I could fill an entire web server with metaphor technology alone, but as mentioned earlier, we've only got space for the elephant's toe nail (another metaphor!)